! WORK IN PROGRESS !
This is my last year student project of my master degree in Isart Digital Paris.
In this project I was almost exclusively with Houdini and UE4 to make different tools.
The race is about 7Km between mountains, tunnel and city so this is why we really need tools to fastly generate and iterate our world.
First render of my Houdini terrain tool in UE4 100% procedural.
(With Megascan assets)
HDA landscape builder.
The first problem was to sculpt the terrrain following the level design, which was made with the landscape spline UE4.
To do this, I made a HDA Tool to Transform a landscape spline into a mesh.
Once I have the mesh following the road, I can export it since UE4 and place it in Zbrush.
Once I have the road mesh on Zbrush I can fastly sculpt the global shape of the map with an average follow of the road.
Now we have the global shape for my Houdini tool.
Now, the Houdini tool for landscape generation in UE4.
Easy world building in Houdini OR UE4.
Making different process to have a realistic looking terrain with erosion.
I adapted the Landscape properly to the UE4 Landscape spline.
UE4 already flatten the landscape with the landscape spline but the result is not that good, we wanted to control very precisely the blur and erosion around the road.
Zbrush global shape
After tool process in game engine.
Once I have the terrain with the flat road and the road mask I can start instancing cliffs, rocks, bushes.
Then, bake them in UE4 to landscape foliage, asset, all with hierarchical LOD and cull distance volumes to keep a good amount of fps.
We can also place, 100% procudurally, tones of different assets we want.
Same process for the trees. (here I use 2 differents types of trees for now)
Avoid trees to spawn on rocks, cliffs and roads by using masks.
I made a ReadMe PNG to explain the tool to the team for them to fastly generate a map and start testing the game. (You can click on the image to see it better)
Still WIP, Updating soon... :)