I've been tinkering a little bit with generating game content, and here is what I got sofar.

Very nice!

bonsak
Very nice!

Thanks man, and here is a new render, this time in Mantra.

Very nice. Looks like an ambitious project incorporating the strengths of both procedural and hand-crafted design principles.

I saw this in the Modo forums and I have to say what you have done is brilliant. I am currently trying to learn Houdini to produce game assets, but I am having trouble getting my head around the best way to approach UVs in Houdini.

Would you mind explaining a bit more about your UVing, texture baking and general workflow? I assume you bake all maps in substance, but how do you approach creating the UVs for modular assets in houdini, or do you bring the optimised geo back into Modo for that?

Tack

Well UV's..always a fun subject… I did alot of tests back and forth but neither procedural or manual UV was up to the bar when it comes to this big and complex meshes…complex beeing alot of “90”'ish degree turns.

The best way solution I came up with in the end was just to use a standard Houdini UV-unwrap (similar to atlas map in Modo) and then just bake out black and white masks from Substance and use a TriPlanar shader with the masks.

Because one of the issues with UV unwrapping these objects is that the resulting bakes in Substance even at 4k looks way to lo-res, but using SD to generate masks and then Tri-Planar shade it I get the res I want and ok-ish looking wear and tear. And it is still ok for game useage.

How do you create the bricks inside the mesh? I could imagine scattering a bunch of points on the surface and using a copy sop but your method seems much better involved.

Hi Magnus, thanks for your response.

So I assume you are using the Poly Reduce tool in Houdini to create the low poly mesh, which you then bring into Substance to create the masks and bake?

Wouldn't you get higher quality results if you were to retopologize the simulated mesh back in modo, which would then allow you to create a cleaner mesh and properly UV the asset before baking?

I guess one of the reasons to create procedural assets is to save time during the production cycle, but how do you then measure the time saved/asset quality ratio?