Hi, this is a scene I finished a couple of days ago. The main purpose for this one was to improve my Houdini skill and test new workflows for a game I´ve been developing for a while now which I recently migrated to ue5.
Everything in this scene is procedural except for some Megascans assets which I used to dress the ground level, appart from that, everything from landscape to fences has been procedurally generated with HDAs inside Unreal.
The scene took from start to finish (including developing the tools) about three weeks.
C&C and more than welcome!
Cheers
Gastón
https://youtu.be/BG0LPlmXmjY
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Hi there @Totinguis,
Hope you’re doing well 
The video really brought this environment to life. Thinking that the majority of this scene has been procedurally generated is honestly mind-blowing.
What was the part of the project that was the biggest learning curve?
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Hi @PresumptivePanda
Thank you, I am glad you liked the scene.
I´ve been using Houdini for some time now, and I also use it every day at work so in that regard there were no issues or difficulties in terms of tool development and how to interact with Unreal. Things were pretty smooth there.
The challenging part was to find the sweet spot on how much I can push both Houdini and Unreal and still have a smooth workflow between the two.
As in UE5 now you can go pretty wild in terms of geo and detail and since I want as much procedural stuff as I can get and leave manual work only for hero stuff (which are also somewhat procedural) I wanted to find a middle ground for responsiveness and high quality. For instance the buildings range from 200k to 500k polys and they come out form the HDA really fast but the cliffs have an average polycount of 1 millon triangles so that was a bit too much for Houdini Engine to handle. It is not that it can´t but it simply makes the tool sluggish and unintuitive to work in editor, so that kind of processes I decided would reamain within Houdini as a tool. Some tools are ideal for instancing and some others create unique assets or at least it is simpler for me to work that way so that was another thing. Tool types and try to categorize them to easily identify them and create premade modules that I can reuse to handle the base logic for each type. Finding all this balance and creating shared logic between the tools which I can reuse over and over again so I dont have to create each and everyone of them from stratch, I think was the challenging part.
The purporse for all of this is to implement it in a game I have been working on for sometime now. It is pretty ambicious from the art stand point for a single person.
That is why I decided to put this time and effort into researching this techniques which I believe will greatly improve my capacity to produce good quality content a lot faster than if I were to do everything in a traditional way.
So, to sum up. The biggest learning curve was to develop a workflow that would let me iterate as fast as I can to help me keep focused on telling a story I guess…
