GDC 2025 Session Viewer

This presentation details the problem-solving process involved in creating visual-dirven, large-scale civil environments of ancient Chinese cities. As Procedural Content Generation (PCG) techniques have become widely used in game development in recent years, the challenge of creating high-quality, civil-centered environments has grown increasingly important. By integrating various techniques such as Unreal Engine, PCG Framework, Houdini, and USD, we enable artists to work freely on a wide range of procedural environment targets, from themed areas to individual building blocks. Additionally, we will discuss how to organically combine artistic modification data with procedurally generated data into a cohesive workflow by Ominiverse USD based backend.

Takeaway

Attendees will gain insights into how we design workflows to address classic challenges encountered when implementing PCG techniques. We will discuss the advantages of using USD as an intermediate format for PCG, the algorithms used for city layout calculations, and the design details of how procedural building tool meets specific art design requirements. Additionally, we will explain how we leverage the Unreal PCG Framework alongside Houdini for specific content creation.

Intended Audience

This talk is open to anyone interested in content creation workflows and techniques for large cities in video game. While generally accessible, some topics may require a basic understanding of Unreal, Houdini, and PCG algorithms.