Project Elderwood explores game art workflows using Houdini and Unreal that feature rich vegetation typical of adventure games. This project highlights advanced modeling and texturing tools, with Houdini creating foliage assets through procedural techniques. The project utilizes the Natsura plugin for live tree creation and offers video tutorials on procedural cliffs and rocks. 

Tutorials and Project Files

Tutorials and other learning materials will be posted here to allow you to dive deeper into this project.

UNREAL Project Files

Explore the world of Project Elderwood with the Unreal project files. Check out the tools that helped build the scenes—including ruins, foliage, and terrain. Make sure you have Houdini Engine set up properly to work with the procedural assets in the Unreal file.

RUINIFY Tutorial

July 24, 2025 | Learn how to create a digital asset which is able to process lowpoly blockout meshes into final ruined assets. This course introduces concepts like voronoi fracturing, converting between polygons and vdbs, and artistic use of decimation. Learn how to create your own edge damage and sediment deposition effects. The end result is a tool that runs in Unreal, and given a mesh input, is able to output a correctly named mesh into a chosen folder with vertex colours and unreal materials assigned.

TEXTURING WITH COPERNICUS Tutorial

July 23, 2025 | In this beginner tutorial series, learn how to create tiling materials from raw highpoly photogrammetry meshes. Using your own photos, generate a scan, and then bring the result into houdini, where we will bake a patch to a square texture, and then process it into a tiling texture. Learn how to build your own "make it tile" function, as well as your own "hsv equalize", "clone stamp" and more. Discover for yourself just how easy it is to get started with copernicus for material creation, and if you are feeling brave - peek under the hood and learn how to setup your own texture baker.

CLIFFS Tutorial

July 22, 2025 | In this intermediate tutorial series, we build a scaleable cliff generation pipeline that involves little to-to-no simulation, and which has a focus on art-directability and fast iteration times. This approach to cliff modelling is modular, step-by-step and efficient. Learn how to effectively use compiled blocks in houdini to balance memory and performance of systems. This course stars the inflate node that was released in Houdini 20.5, as well as Houdinis cluster sop. The end goal is to create cliffs for use in Unreal, without breaking the bank of performance or disk size. These cliffs do not use instancing, but each module covers a large area of the terrain, and is relatively low-poly, relying on nanite displacement in-engine to carry the surface details.

SIGGRAPH ASIA:

Project Elderwood and the State of Foliage with Natsura

Dec 3, 2024 | Introducing Project Elderwood, a new work-in-progress showcase of game-engine workflows using Houdini and Unreal Engine with a special focus on Plants and Vegetation modelling workflows in Houdini, taking advantage of the third-party Natsura tools developed by Feike Postmes and George Hulm.