ScavLab - Terrain Generation Pipeline

Terrain generation for Scavlab; This was a really awesome project to be part of and truly mindboggling to play!
Video of the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thpJebPxXSo

Big props up top to Matt for giving it a world creator pass; and for the rest of the art team for doing a fantastic job populating it :)

The brief was to have a "bowl" filled with tracks that players could slide down; however as this wasn't a main game mode we were not able to adjust the slide mechanic; so we needed a way to generate and iterate on these tracks quickly; especially as working by hand would eat time and any change would have massive knock on effects.

The solution was a Blender > Houdini > UE4 tool chain. Using blenders curves allowed me to quickly iterate on the tracks themselves and catch problem zones quickly. Once we had a layout that was good I put it through Houdini to build a landscape around the tracks and export as a heightmap for unreal. With this workflow we could potentially get 2 iterations of the map a day with QA. Within a week or so we were able to lock down a map which would have otherwise taken months. Once the map was locked it was passed to Matt Birkett-Smith for a procedural detail pass and material work.

3 Sets of tracks were finished for the ScavLab event, with one of them being brought up for a larger detail pass for the first live event.

Also a big thanks to Midwinter for letting us use their assets :) And a big thanks to the rest of the Improbable envionment art team (Matt,Stu,Jamie,Kjetil & Vanessa)

https://www.artstation.com/kjetilm
https://www.artstation.com/stuartbugg
https://www.artstation.com/vanessagio
https://www.artstation.com/mbirkettsmith