This research focuses on stability, ease of use, and increased production efficiency for this procedural workflow to construct an immersive naturalized open world environment to discuss the best workflow and its benefits for industry production. Stability of this procedural workflow is defined as how much RAM or CPU it takes for mass photogrammetry (high polygon) assets, and if it crashes frequently in this process, as everything would be real-time. Ease of use is defined as how seamless between each software for the artists, and how easy it is to track versions across countless assets and scenes. Production efficiency is measured by the speed of iteration in each software when both opening and transferring data, with parameter adjustments in real-time, and in relation to the environment population detail.

Firstly to examine the stability on how fast each change and replacement can be made in procedural tweaks. I created a procedural terrain with Houdini and generated all of the different terrain shapes in real-time inside UE5.2. An example of this workflow starts with designing a few concepts with real world references and research on a natural, open world landscape. Then block out the main geometry of the terrain in Maya, also generate the landscape with the Houdini ‘HeightField Node’ and with ‘HeightField Project Node’ to attach the blocked out geometry onto the generated landscape. Further added ‘HeightField Distort Node’ and ‘HeightField Erode Node’ to simulate real life erosion for the landscape variations and fine details. The landscape will need to look very natural, therefore tweaks in the terrain generation is needed with masking the stretching slopes and flatten it using ‘HeightField Flatten Node’.

Once the base terrain is generated, we then create different masks for grass, water, debris, rocks etc., using ‘HeightField Mask by Feature Node’. This allows adjustments in the masks by ways like ‘Mask by Slope’, ‘Mask by Height’ and so on. All these Nodes have parameters that can be bridged to iterate in Unreal Engine after packaging the Houdini data in HDA. Naming these masks is key, as it’s named by ‘HeightField Copy Layer Node’, it allows naming for the landscape materials to be recognised directly by the UE5 landscape system. To connect with UE5’s instance material, I created ‘Attribute Create node’ and modified the Class and Type to ‘Primitive’ and ‘String’ by adding the UE5 instance material path. Similarly, scatter on the terrain can be created in the same structure. By using ‘HeightField Scatter Node’ on the masks created, it allows instancing point data to be generated. Which can be used for position (pivot data) to where we want foliage or vegetation to spawn in UE real-time. The ‘Copy to Points Node’ allows us to use either assets or simple geo as proxies to swap with photogrammetry models in Unreal. Parameters in the ‘HeightField Scatter Node’ can also be attached to the HDA for iterations in UE5 in real-time.