Simone Huisman

Hi there! I haven't had a lot of time to work on my project thus far, but I'm definitely going to be locking in over the next two months

My environment scene is going to be based on the city of Molaesmyr, a location from Critical Role, a web show where a group of voice actors play Dungeons & Dragons. Unfortunately, because the medium of a D&D campaign doesn't provide a lot of visuals for locations, I've had to work mostly off of Dungeon Master Matthew Mercer's descriptions of the city. Fortunately, Mercer is very good at describing locations, and so through combing through episode transcripts, I was able to build up a good picture of what it's meant to look like.

The Lore:
Molaesmyr was a city in the middle of a vibrant forest, where elves lived and worked together to further develop their magical abilities, fueled by a huge magical crystal buried beneath the city. However, something went catastrophically wrong, and the crystal itself became corrupted, spreading its corruption to Molaesmyr and the surrounding forest. Now, 300 years later, Molaesmyr is an overgrown ruin, inhabited by the ghosts of those elves who couldn't flee fast enough, and the horrifying, mutated animals warped by the corruption still seeping from the ground.

My plan:
I'm only going to build a small section of the city, since building the whole thing would take way too much time, and I have other responsibilities as well. I have lots of ideas, but my main focus for the start of the project will be:

- Using Natsura and Copernicus to create trees, vines, and ferns.
- Creating a system that can make ruined buildings.
- Creating a large tower hero asset that can serve as the centerpoint of the scene.

I'll also be repurposing some of my existing tools to create mushrooms and hanging cables.

Does the environment also need to be entirely constructed within Houdini, or can we import Houdini-assets into Unreal as HDAs or static meshes and construct the environment from there? For instance: if I have 10 different types of trees in Houdini, can I only scatter them on the terrain in Houdini, or can I import them into Unreal and paint them onto the terrain there?

Seconding the questions about using Gaea nodes and using Substance Painter for textures. Related to that, is it okay if we use Megascans for tree textures and smaller foliage assets like grasses/ferns/bushes?