Welcome to this three part tutorial series on how to create a procedural railroad in Houdini for game engines like Unreal and Unity. We'll go over the basic generation of the tracks, some colourcoding and parameters before diving into Unreal for materials and collision!

1 | Basic Parameters & Attributes

In the first lesson of our Railroad series, we'll go over some basic curve-based generation of our railroad. We'll start off with some of the basic attributes and show you how to create some preset in your parameter interface!

Length: 39:14

2 | Unreal Materials & Parameters

In this lesson, we will continue and create an HDA from the previous setup and generate collisions and add some materials from the existing ones in Unreal.

Length: 24:08

3 | Instancing and Attributes

In the third lesson, you will learn how to generate more detail in our balast, by instancing a single box (deformed with the mountain node) to generate a realistic setup in Unreal.

Length: 21:00
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CREATED BY

Ivo van Roij
IVO VAN ROIJ

As the original founder of Dokai, Ivo is passionate about using Houdini to create procedural content for cinematics and videogames, and is currently working as a Technical Artist on the new Gran Turismo games for Polyphony Digital at SONY Interactive Entertainment with the focus on Environmental design. He graduated from IGAD (International Games Architecture & Design) in Breda with 3 years of experience with Houdini, and loves environmental design. He also interned at SideFX Software‘s game dev team in 2018/2019.He grew up in Tilburg, The Netherlands, is an avid martial artist, and wants to help you with his knowledge and share his experience from the industry through tutorials and seminars!

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COMMENTS

  • Kaiyang 4 years, 5 months ago  | 

    Thanks Ivo! I am also working on a procedural railroad, your tutorial helps me a lot.
    Now I am facing a challenge about the intersection part among railroad track, where the sleepers should be merged into a long one, rather than overlapped.
    Do you have any idea? Thank you.

    • Ivo van Roij 4 years, 5 months ago  | 

      Hey! Thanks so much for watching. There are multiple options of handling intersections actually. The most realistic one would be to model the intersecting parts procedurally based on real life reference, and have that connect to the rails. Basically creating a point where the railroads connect. Anyways, that's a lot of work and a lot of hassle to figure out precisely. I would suggest using either boolean, selecting points based on one of the intersections ballast or us cutting planes. I won't be going over it in this series because I want to create quick, easy to follow basic tutorials to show the power of Houdini, but I might create a subway series in the future where I will be going a bit more into traintrack details. Either way, thanks for watching!
      Cheers!

  • dashuzhao.1989 3 years, 5 months ago  | 

    nice

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