GDC 2025 Session Viewer
Twisting Terrain and Populating Forests on an Anomalized Olympic Peninsula for Pacific Drive (Presented by Houdini)
Karl Kohlman (Tech Artist, Pacific Drive)
Kendall Wix (Level Designer, Ironwood Studios)
Location: Room 3020, West Hall
Date: Wednesday, March 19
Time: 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Pass Type: All Access Pass, Core Pass, Summits Pass, Expo Pass, Audio Pass, Indie Games Summit Pass - Get your pass now!
Track: Design
Format: Sponsored Session
Vault Recording: Video
Audience Level: All
As an indie game studio, Ironwood Studios needed an efficient way to make a massive number of bespoke maps for their game, Pacific Drive, but with only a small team to do so. Utilizing Houdini Engine for Unreal and with the help of a proprietary UE plugin, they created a suite of tools to empower a much smaller team to create and decorate a large library of dense and diverse maps. Karl Kohlman (tech artist) will cover the general methodologies used to refine rough terrain sculpts into shippable landscapes, generating maps for landscape material layers, controllable blending of biomes, road spline incorporation and terrain modification, and foliage scattering based on all of the aforementioned data. Kendall Wix (level designer) will cover the end user experience, how he incorporated the tools into his work flow, as well as the myriad of benefits the tools provided.
Takeaway
Participants will explore a complete terrain and procedural foliage authoring pipeline that consists of multiple stages back and forth between Houdini and Unreal, utilizing multiple methods of data transfer, native to Houdini Engine and otherwise.
Intended Audience
The intended audience would be engineers, tech artists, and level designers. Participants would benefit from a general technical knowledge of heightfields and Houdini's handling of point data, though the general workflow can be understood without that.
