Houdini
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2019–2022
1:06:05 · 99K views · Jun 19, 2018
Ubisoft procedural technical artist Etienne Carrier explains the Houdini-based tools used to build Far Cry 5's roughly 100 square km open world. It covers generating biomes, texturing terrain, freshwater networks, cliff rocks and vegetation placement.
HN points people to it as a rare, concrete look at how a AAA studio uses procedural tools to fill huge worlds with natural-looking environments.
4 comments from Hacker News
Looks amazing! Note that the author also has a fantasy city generator: [LINK] And mansion generator: [LINK] If you're into that kind of stuff, there's a world map generator(by different author): [LINK] and this amazing tutorial on generating maps: [LINK] ---- Also, kinda relevant - awesome talks about modern procedural generation techniques(with AI, Houdini, etc): How AI will change 3D industry [LINK] Procedural world generation for Far Cry this video Procedurally generating Manhattan for Spider Man [LINK] Mindblowing talks by Anastasia Opara (using cool math, deep learning, and a lot of creativity to create crazy cool stuff) [LINK] She is the author of the most impressive procedural generation project I've ever seen: [LINK] ---- Also, I myself have made a little tutorial about procedurally generating a 3D landscape in Houdini: [LINK]
It has its applications in a different way, tool assisted level design. Software suites like Houdini, which is something of an industry standard in VFX and gamedev can potentially leverage ML techniques. AFAIK the folks who make Houdini have talked in the past about using ML to improve their terrain heightmap modelling, improving the quality of the erosion etc... The real value add with using procedural tools to automate creating parts of large worlds (eroded terrain, placement of foliage according to rules) is that it frees up artist time to focus on hand crafting individual locations and detail into the map. There is an interesting talk from Ubisoft which talks about how they leverage tools for building their large worlds this video (slides: [LINK] )
Somewhat related(okay, not really, but still fun) - awesome talks about modern procedural generation techniques(with AI, Houdini, etc): How AI will change 3D industry [LINK] Procedural world generation for Far Cry this video Procedurally generating Manhattan for Spider Man [LINK] Mindblowing talks by Anastasia Opara (using cool math, deep learning, and a lot of creativity to create crazy cool stuff) [LINK] Procedurally generating 3D landscape in Houdini (a little tutorial I have made, can't resist sharing) [LINK]
You may enjoy this talk, the devs for Far Cry 5 procedurally generated quite a lot of their world, placing plants based on the ground slope, sun, whether they were under power lines, elevation etc. this video