BEST REALTIME ENVIRONMENT 

FIRST PLACE | Robin Cai

The Elden Ring-inspired castle and Erdtree environment was created using Unreal Engine 5.6 with traditional asset workflows, where all assets were made in Houdini and exported to Unreal. The project features particles and mist effects made in Unreal using Niagara and procedural material animation, with assets including the Erdtree, hero castles, background castles, terrain and cliffs, plus textures made using Cops, while the castle generator is the only HDA made to keep everything cleaner.

BEST REALTIME ENVIRONMENT 

SECOND PLACE | Jamie Zhang

The ruins environment was inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, featuring ancient stone ruins illuminated by warm campfire light against a twilight sky filled with lush foliage and trees. The scene was created using custom procedural tools built in Houdini, including ruins walls, trees, flowers, and campfire tools, along with a stylized foliage decal made in COPS, representing the artist's first full environment built entirely with their own procedural workflows.

BEST REALTIME ENVIRONMENT 

THIRD PLACE | Mike Perzel

The post-apocalyptic urban environment features a dramatic eclipse or solar corona above destroyed city ruins, with scattered fires illuminating the desolate landscape below. The scene was created focusing on building a comprehensive toolset for Unreal Engine that includes a Greeble Generator, Cavity Scatter tool, and Building Generator to streamline the environment creation process.

BEST REALTIME FX 

FIRST PLACE | Aleksei Shcherbina

The Waterfall Rock Generation Asset is a procedural asset designed to automatically generate beautiful rocks with waterfalls based on artist sketches, eliminating the need for environment artists to work with effects artists. The tool creates countless variations through customizable settings, allowing artists to focus on main composition forms while the asset handles waterfall generation and environmental details automatically.

BEST REALTIME FX 

SECOND PLACE | Ilya Pavlov

The glowing magical mushrooms project shows mushrooms breaking through fractured ground with luminous beams of light and sparkling pollen effects. The effect was made entirely in Houdini using a timeline-controlled workflow that combines a growing mushroom (part one) with ground fracturing (part two), utilizing VATs/Alembic exports for mushroom growth, VATs/FBX exports for fracture combinations, and flipbook textures for the magical pollen elements.

BEST REALTIME FX 

THIRD PLACE | Kirill Vysotin

The magical stone portal effect is created entirely through shader work, featuring a luminous archway that assembles from individual stones with glowing particles and mysterious butterflies. The effect was built using curve-generated stone arcs with vertex colors controlling rotation and assembly speed, baked stone textures for fake scattered debris, portal content meshes with vertex color edge highlighting, magical dust particles spawned along the arc positions, and atmospheric elements, including sparks, dirt particles, and butterflies, to enhance the mysterious mood.

BEST GAME ART TOOL 

FIRST PLACE | Luka Croisez Ventura

The "NewByzance" project features a grand Byzantine-inspired architectural environment with ornate domed buildings, classical arches, and lush vegetation, created using a sophisticated procedural pipeline. The project combines NewByzance, a smart procedural content generator that creates entire environments from simple input primitives, with Undini, a custom pipeline that bypasses Houdini Engine to provide direct control over data transfer between Houdini and Unreal through a widget-driven interface, utilizing extensive VEX coding and Unreal's PCG system for performance optimization.

BEST GAME ART TOOL 

SECOND PLACE | Lei Wu

The Strangler Fig Generator tool is designed to create entangled banyan trees with adaptive aerial roots that "strangle" ruins, cliffs, or temples for desolate and overgrown environments. The tool was built in Houdini 20.5.613 and optimized for Unreal Engine 5.5 with LODs and UCX collisions ready, featuring procedurally generated hanging roots and leaf clusters along with companion elements like moss and wrapping roots for enhanced environmental integration.

BEST GAME ART TOOL

HONORABLE MENTION | Jim Price

This Elderwoods tool is a complete game development pipeline created in Houdini for the Playdate handheld console, featuring a capybara character in a 1-bit monochrome environment with detailed pixel art trees and landscapes. 

The project demonstrates a comprehensive workflow using custom Houdini tools, including Dither COP and Bit Composite COP for 1-bit graphics processing, along with Bitmap Library SOP, Level Builder SOP, and Map Builder SOP for content creation, all exported as JSON data to run on the Playdate's 400x240 resolution display with the game backend written in Zig.