Week 14 - Procedural Foliage Methods in Unreal Engine 5

WIP Beauty Shots

Procedural Vine Tool in Houdini

In hindsight, maybe this as my first Houdini project was not a great idea. But then again, I've never been one for good ideas or healthy work mentalities.

Faced with the understanding that I had an incredible amount of R&D waiting to grab me over break as I tried to enjoy my break in peace, I decided to lean into the workaholic lifestyle and shape my Technical Art final to break some of those topics down. The biggest curiosity for me was how we could implment limited artists to make assets as fast as possible without losing quality or artists sanity.

As such, proceduralism and Houdini's open arms took hold. I decided to go with a procedural vine tool since it has the most potential to be used in the levels and covers areas that Speed Tree cannot, aka fitting vines to custom meshes.

An example of Parameters available in the system. I wanted to provide as much possibility for optimization support as that is a big concern of my team for the inclusion of foliage and city environments, these settings would allow for a range of polygong counts on the assets utilizing this tool. I also included some lesser-utilized tools, such as 'Growth', which will essentially dictate how much the foliage has grown up the asset, incase there needed to be tweaks in the future.

Assembling in Engine

For the specific hero prop of the church, and since this is a cinematic scene, it utilizes three different instances of the vine mesh: the base wood vines, a smaller leaf inner layer, and larger leaf outer layer. I am running into an issue in Houdini with getting the materials connect with the appropriate group, or even seperate into two seperate materials (vines and leaves) so I created a parameter on the options tab as a temporary solution (Full Bush / Seperate Leaf & Bush)

Scene Assembly

All 3D models are taken from Fab or are a Megascans asset with some slight editing to the church to remove the vine spawning from the inside of the mesh. I also made sure to put some time into lighting the scene appropriately so that all details could be fully seen and appreciated 

Foliage Master Material

I have to admit, this was not my initial idea; it was inspired by two of my mentees own personal projects - one made a master material for a small environment he was making to save time on making new materials for everything and the other has been doing a shader study on Breath of the Wild's grass - shoutout to both of them!

After digging through many AAA games, but most notably Wayfinder, I've noticed that many many studios use a small number of master materials to create all of their objects, instancing them with various parameters. I wanted to take a shot at this since I will be working with Regradable's Art Lead and 3D artists to develop further environment tools for them, including a procedural building generator to work with a modular kit.

In it's current state, this is very bare bones but allows for easy customization of foliage tools to the best of my ability. While I'm still working with the placeholder foliage I have the wind speeds set up on a Material Parameter Collection so they can be automatically updated as needed. However I do plan on updating this, or at least tweaking the formula as soon as I get further variations in.

Reference Board

For this project I knew I wanted to use this tool for Regradable (check out my other work for that here) which takes place in a futuristic dystopian city, which immediately took out the most fun option for scenery haha. As a result, I took inspiration from a buddy playing through Red Dead Redemption 2 and my favorite region, West Elizabeth, a region taking a lot of inspiration from Colorado, northern California, and the panhandle of Oklahoma

General Resources for this Project

How To Make Landscape Layer Materials with Natural Height Blending in Unreal Engine 5

HOUDINI 101 - 10 - Organizing Node Networks

Beginner PCG Tutorial | Unreal Engine 5.4

Optimized Stylized Grass texture by VFX Therapy

Project Titan Ivy Tool

Current Critiques/To-do

• Better naming for parameters - i know what they mean, but test subjects (aka random people in the cohort) do not - that is a problem.
• Material difference between vines and leaves
• Add more variety of plants outside of daisys, spruce_tree_01, and a vine texture from google

Caden (UCF GaIM Alumni)

• I don't think the lights inside should be flickering, it looks like a bug and is otherwise unnoticeable. I'd just remove it
• The depth of field causes a great deal of issues with certain parts of the foliage that should be in the midground, but for whatever reason appear in the fore / background because of the blurring
• your composition is good, but I think the actual model for the church is somewhat lacking. I can't put an exact finger on it, but it somehow seems out of place / noncontiguous with the rest of the environment. I blame the detail of the ivy - maybe some more grunge on the church?
• I think that, while the scene doesn't appear static, I think it is missing some points of intrigue beyond just the church. Maybe some particle systems of bugs or god-rays could add some interest

Chandler (Cohort 22)

• The ground texturing feels quite flat. It could be from the DOF but i think it could be pushed further regardless. If you're unwilling to push higher fidelity on the landscape mat (which is fair) then i'd up your foliage actors in general, the church is being overtaken by vegetation so it's make sense that the surrounding area is quite consumed by nature im thinking more of the context of the scene here