Seb van den Beemt - Rookie Awards 2024.

Procedural destroyed castle wall generator

This was one of the projects I did during my studies at Breda University of Applied Sciences. This is a fully procedural castle wall made with Houdini and Unreal PCG.

As the end user of the tool, you can draw out a line that describes the main shape of the castle wall. After that, you can add destruction boxes that outline where the destruction should occur.

The geometry was generated in Houdini. The scattering of the foliage was done in Unreal PCG. All the foliage assets and textures are from Quixel Bridge and Quixel Mixer.

A breakdown of the modeling process in Houdini.

A breakdown of the destruction and fracturing process in Houdini.

A showcase of how vertex colors are used in Houdini to drive the castle shader in Unreal.

Several variations of the castle wall.

Python scripting

Copy to points script in Maya. Houdini has a node thats called "copy to points", which allows you to copy meshes towards certain vertices. This is a feature that I miss in Maya, so I decided to recreate it in python.

Renamer script. Maya has a default renamer script, but I think could have been a bit better, so I created my own version.

During my studies at BUAS, I also practiced my coding skills. In below videos, you can find an algorithm for procedurally generating snowflakes in Houdini. The algorithm is mainly based on this post: https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/39361/how-to-generate-a-random-snowflake
However, I also added some custom rules in the algorithm to enhance the look of the generated snowflakes.