A Generated Hiveworld
Fully procedural Hiveworld generated using Houdini and Unreal engine
Overview:
Generated the scene fully in Houdini, then passed it into Unreal Engine 5 using the Houdini Engine plugin.
Houdini Process
The generation happened in 6 major phases, linked together at different points in their generation.
Major Buildings
The buildings were generated with a randomized grid entirely in Houdini, with overlapping buildings. The windows were the main focus of this portion, having both a ordered series of windows and randomized scattered ones.
Pipes
To break up the building's monotony, and for worldbuilding, a pipe generator was created and hooked into the buildings, creating a network of pipes
Shantytown
Using inspiration from Ready Player One and real world references, I created an automated system for creating stacks of container style buildings.
Parasitic Outcrops
To break up the monotony of the buildings, some parasitic outcrops were added to the buildings, instancing them together with the favelas generation.
The Walkways
The most complex portion of the generation, creating walkways that connect various buildings from the Shantytown together
Pillars
Generated pillars to support the walkways and shantytown buildings
Modeling
The modeling was focusing on speed of development and optimization, as the focus of the project is on the generation.
Shader
To achieve the look I wanted, I used a shader that would take in data from Houdini using the custom instance data to drive the different types of materials to be able to use only one shader instance over the entirety of the scene, with a total of 16 texture samples over the entire scene.
Post and lighting
Towards the end, a quick pass of post processing and lighting (all praise no shadows lights) was added to better convey the feel of the environment
Lighting
Post
Variations
Then, for the sake of making a cool video, the post, generation and lighting were modified in 3 different ways, while leaving the central walkway untouched
Conclusion
This was a really fun project to work on, and I'm looking forward to playing around with more tech stuff in the future!!
Thanks for reading all the way here!
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