Download custom Houdini tools from SideFX’s Project Elderwood
SideFX has begun releasing custom Houdini tools developed for Project Elderwood, its in-house tech demo of procedural workflows for building natural environments for games.
The releases include procedural tools for generating cliffs and ruins.
You can also download the Unreal Engine project files, including the complete baked level, and procedural vegetation assets, including oak trees and ivy.
Project Elderwood: showcasing procedural workflows for creating in-game vegetation
Like the earlier Project Titan and Project Grot, Project Elderwood is an in-house tech demo designed to test procedural workflows for creating 3D content for use in games.
In this case, the focus of the work is on creating natural environments – and more specifically, those containing a lot of vegetation.
As such, the main custom tool used on the project is Natsura, a new third-party tree-generation plugin, currently in early access, and which we will be covering in a separate story.
Download custom Houdini tools for generating cliffs and ruins
However, SideFX has also released the tools used to generate the non-organic parts of the environment, along with video tutorials explaining how they were created.
That includes a tool for generating cliffs and large rocks procedurally across terrain, making use of the new Planar Inflate node introduced in Houdini 20.5.
The geometry it generates is relatively lightweight, on the assumption that fine surface detail will be added inside Unreal Engine using Nanite displacement.
Another custom tool, Ruinify, converts low-poly blockout geometry into detailed ruins, generating fractures, edge damage and dirt deposition.
Download the complete Unreal Engine project files for Project Elderwood
SideFX has also released the Unreal Engine 5 project files for Project Elderwood.
They include the complete baked Unreal Engine level, and – if you have Houdini Engine set up – editable procedural assets, including vegetation: the screenshots accompanying the download show assets for ivy and oak trees.
License and system requirements
The Project Elderwood tools are available free as .hip files created in Houdini 20.5.
The Project Elderwood Unreal Engine project file is available under SideFX’s Standard license, which permits use in commercial projects.
To use its procedural content, you will need Houdini Engine for Unreal.
It is now included in the Houdini installer, and is free for use on commercial projects, but only works with commercial licenses of the software, not free Houdini Apprentice licenses.
You can find pricing and system requirements for Houdini in this story on Houdini 20.5.
Read more about Project Elderwood on the SideFX website
(Includes links to video tutorials, which also include downloads for the custom tools)
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