This project was an opportunity to explore Unreal Engine's PCG system to efficiently create a forest environment, and to try and combine a PCG system with HDA tools made in Houdini. My goal for this project was to use as many procedural elements as possible. To create the forest itself I used a PCG graph to place foliage from Megascans and the Unreal Engine store on top of a terrain made in Houdini from LIDAR data of Golden, Colorado. I used the landscape material to selectively remove foliage from a specific material to create a path through the forest.

The canopy walkway from my reference had two distinct elements, the elevated platforms and connecting bridges. I decided to create the elevated platforms through an HDA with parameters to control height, diameter, number of sides, pole thickness, and support structure in order to have the most flexibility. Once the platforms were generated, I used the resulting static mesh as a reference point within a blueprint to generate splines connected between each corner of the platform and a central point. The splines were then referenced in another PCG graph set up to place lights at even intervals along the spline's length.

To create the walkways, I used a combination of a traditional spline tool and a PCG graph to achieve the results I wanted. I created a simple railing mesh in Maya, and then created a blueprint to instance that mesh along a spline. For the planks of the path itself however, I wanted to use PCG instead of instancing since I would have much better control over the way the planks were oriented. I could make them either align to the angle of the spline for a smooth pathway or remain in a fixed orientation to create steps.