Houdini RnD

As part of the on-going development work for the Crash franchise promotional work, I took an opportunity to look into overhauling how environments were constructed for the various locations and scenes. Previously, things were mostly manually built by placing assets by hand, which proved time consuming for the larger scenes. In the closing vista shot for the previous trailer, I used a range of scattering techniques in C4D to quickly populate the environment. In order to optimise time and reduce laborious work moving forwards, I wanted to take this a step further and attempt to build as much as possible in a procedural manner.

Due to the nature of the Crash games, the large majority of Crash’s world is made up of some form of track-like structure. I made use of Houdini to build a system that would take an input curve and use that to generate a track and surrounding landscape. The track would be populated in a way that would match the game aesthetic as well as being art-directable. The space around the track would then be filled with various types of foliage and other background props.

Once the Houdini prototype work was in a good place, I published an HDA and brought things into Unreal with a basic set of materials and assets from a previous look-dev project. Anyone working in Unreal could quickly lay down an instance of this asset and modify the curve to generate a base pass for their respective shot, which could then be further refined by swapping out the various props and foliage instances based on the aesthietic requirements of the shot.

To fully qualify the benefits of using Houdini, I also delivered a number of offline renders using the same set of assets and loosely matching the lighting in Unreal. In this case using the VRay 5 Beta. This was done to demonstrate the flexibility of the system.