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PCG for Complex Level Design and Lumen for Real-time Lighting in Unreal Engine 5

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Procedural Content Generation (PCG) framework is an amazing tool within Unreal which can be used in many different ways, from foliage, biome design to world building and more. It uses an algorithm to scatter points on landscape or any meshes and use the points data to place other assets/blueprint actors on top of it. So creating large scale forest and environments procedurally in Unreal has become very interesting and this will only get better and better with time.  I wanted to test the PCG workflow and look into the possibility of creating complicated levels which otherwise would be very time consuming and tricky to create. When I came across PCG, I thought what if we can use it to create a large scale treasure vault like what Uncle Scrooge have in Duck Tales or something similar to the Smaug's Treasure from the Hobbit movie.  The Result   (Treasure Level using PCG)   It is very interesting that how PCG can help us creating such complex level and keep most of the w...
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Volumetric Effects Emerging in Real-time

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Creating volumetric effects has always been a challenge for FX artists. It is not only the visual output but also the simulation time, the iterations and the rendering time it takes to achieve a good-looking sequence which takes a lot of time. That is why, over the years, FX has been one of the most complicated and costliest things for any project. So, it is an Fx artist's dream to visualize any volumetric effects in real-time where everything is live and there is hardly any guess work involved.  Over the past few years game engine technology has been a key topic because of its technological advancements and the flexible workflow it provides. But when it comes to Fx, it was surely lacking some of the key features and technologies which FX artists has been using for years to create realistic and believable effects for movies and series. With the likes of Unreal's volumetric effects natively built-in within the engine, it feels like a dream come true for all the FX artists out t...
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Rigid Body Fx For Games Using Houdini & Unreal Engine (Part 2)

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  In Part 1 of the blog, we have seen how we can use baked rigid body simulation data inside game engine for various purposes. Now in Part 2 of this blog, we will go through the process of doing rigid body destruction in  real-time .  In order to do it in real-time , we will look into the Apex Destruction plugin in Unreal which helps to create destructible asset with fracturing and to assign physical properties which helps in the calculation of simulation.   Rigid Body Destruction (Real-time solution)   (Rigid Body Destruction in Real-time) The above destruction of assets is done at runtime based on defined number of fracture pieces. We can either define the fracture patterns in engine itself or can import the fracture asset and use it in the engine. Let us have a look at those options.    1. In-Engine Fracture (Simple Fracture in Engine) As shown above, Voronoi method ha s been used to fracture the pieces. This is a quick in-built fracture solution...
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Rigid Body Fx For Games Using Houdini & Unreal Engine (Part 1)

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  A good destruction Fx for real-time can be done in multiple ways. So I decided to test some of those workflows and here I am sharing some of my learning from it. One such workflow is to simulate rigid body dynamics in Houdini and export the data for the game engine. Then we can use the data in engine for either gameplay and non-interactive elements or for cinematic purposes. Another way to do such effects involve real-time physical simulation on objects. This involves runtime calculations and is comparatively costly. So based on the specific requirement, we can choose either way to do it.    In this Part 1 of the blog, I will be sharing the baked data techniques where I have used Houdini and Unreal for this workflow but this can be done on any other game engine as well.   Rigid Body Destruction (Baked solution) (Rigid Body Destruction in Unreal) The above effect is done using a combination of both baked and real-time elements. The baked data are for the rigid body ...
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