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TOTAL DURATION: 3h 42m 8s

Project Pegasus's goal was to utilize Unreal 5 features, such as Nanite, and push for a high level of detail. The team developed a workflow for generating procedural cliffs to add additional detail to the landscape.

Learn how to create Digital Assets to convert a heightfield to geometry and split off the cliff sections. You’ll then subdivide and displace the geometry using height maps, and split larger cliffs into tiles. Then, learn how to assemble the Digital Assets into a TOPs network to automate generating cliffs for the entire island.

Importing a large amount of Nanite geometry into Unreal presents many challenges. It becomes important to manage computer memory usage. In the later lessons, you’ll learn how to manage computer resources and avoid crashing Unreal when importing the geometry into Unreal.

Note for Lesson 12 - You’ll be shown how increasing the subdivision to its fullest extent causes memory issues and crashes Unreal. Importing and processing the Nanite geometry will be very memory intensive. The lesson will demonstrate what will happen when your computer runs out of memory and Unreal crashes. You’ll learn to import the geometry in smaller batches and avoid these memory issues.

CREATED BY

iansmithartist
IAN SMITH

Ian Smith has 10+ years of working on pre-rendered and real-time projects and is currently working with SideFX on Project Pegasus, a showcase of Houdini procedural workflows with UE5. Ian is also CG Supervisor at NSC Creative, an award-winning studio specialising in immersive experiences, including VR, theme parks and fulldome.

More from Ian Smith

COMMENTS

  • zisu666666 1 year ago  | 

    Thanks for the tutorial!

  • binbinwei8 1 year ago  | 

    It seems to be missing from the project file.
    PE_Cliff_Generator.hda

    • iansmithartist 1 year ago  | 

      Thanks, will try to update this as soon as possible.

  • donlanlan.lee 1 year ago  | 

    hi, I get a error when I cook the geometry import node ,flowing the tutorial. the error:
    Error
    Empty or missing file path
    Error
    Invalid input geometry
    How should I do ?

    • iansmithartist 1 year ago  | 

      I've tried to recreate your error but have been unable to. Are you able to give me more information? It might be useful to post on the forum in Houdini Learning Materials and share your Houdini file. https://www.sidefx.com/forum/10/

  • ehabqurah.graphtut 1 year ago  | 

    excellent very very wonderful

  • nnniiannn 11 months, 1 week ago  | 

    Kami Sama!

  • KosITGaming 11 months ago  | 

    Hello, i am new to houdini and i really enjoyed these tutorials, but i get stuck on lesson 9 - Importing HDA into Unreal . everything is working fine in houdini. but in unreal engine when i want to cook it says 1 waiting and 1 cooking and then fails 2 after a couple seconds and the cook logs say: One or more upstream nodes have failed work items. This node is not fully generated thats starts from the 03_Extract_Cliffs_Split all the way to HE_OUT. I guess thats because it already fails at loading the landscape. Any idea what i might be doing wrong? in houdini it al works perfectly

  • KosITGaming 10 months, 4 weeks ago  | 

    I got it working, turns out i had the load landscape hda file set with $hip as source directory in the top network. Now the cooking works but unreal crashes when it starts baking. when i turn of auto bake everything works fine, when i hit bake unreal crashes with this error:

    Assertion failed: PackageName.StartsWith(L"/" + FString(MountPointName)) [File:D:\build\++UE5\Sync\Engine\Source\Runtime\CoreUObject\Private\UObject\UObjectBaseUtility.cpp] [Line: 239]

    Anyone experienced this?

    • TimBayer 10 months, 1 week ago  | 

      I am having the exact same error, did you find a solution?

    • TimBayer 10 months, 1 week ago  | 

      In case anyone else runs into this, it's probably a path issue.

      In my unreal_bake_folder attribute, the path was missing the "/" in front of "/Game". Once I added the "/", deleted all the output files, and recooked everything, the bake worked.

      • Noob_Noob 1 month, 3 weeks ago  | 

        Hey, I'm having the same issue. I've added the / but not sure the path to the output files to delete... I know we set /Game/Pegasus/Landscape/Cliffs but where is the Game folder located?

        • Noob_Noob 1 month, 3 weeks ago  | 

          NVM I'm such an idiot. sorted it.

  • 365384849 10 months, 4 weeks ago  | 

    123

  • DevoStevo 9 months, 4 weeks ago  | 

    I just hooked up the PE_Heightfield_Layers_to_ID & Houdini gives the following error;

    "Traceback (most recent call last): File "/obj/geo1/PE_Heightfield_Layers_to_ID1/id_layer", line 8, in expression
    File "C:\PROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.590/houdini/python3.10libs\hou.py", line 40976, in dictAttribValue
    return _hou.Geometry_dictAttribValue(self, *args) hou.OperationFailed: The attempted operation failed. No attribute with this name exists".

    Anyone else had this issue?

  • Igrom 9 months, 1 week ago  | 

    I'm wondering how to create my ID_Map_Layers preset and save as Metadata$OS.bgeo.sc? I haven't found any documentation or video on this topic.

    • JamesBinnsy 8 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

      I am also struggling with creating this file, did you manage to figure it out?

  • colossus323 8 months ago  | 

    Hello, guys! I have an issue: when I try to cook HDA Processor with Extract Cliffs, I getting an error , saying ''ERROR: Node failed to cook:
    Invalid source /obj/geo1/HF_Extract_Cliffs1/convertheightfield1/repeat_end1.
    (Error: Failure to cook template geometry.).
    Deleting node '/obj/geo1'
    ERROR: Failed to cook .hda''
    So I tried to disable nodes before Convert Heightfield node, and I found out that cook will work if i disable flowfield node, which I actually need. But even then, none of my HDA Processors are seem to write anything in to the cache, because nothing is showing up when I press View Work Item Output, and Geometry Import doesnt export any ''class'' pieces. Can you please help me with that, thanks.

  • Getyamamout 4 months, 3 weeks ago  | 

    Just a thought would it be possible to not displace the cliffs in houdini and just send the masks and cliff planes to unreal to keep the geo low and have unreal do the displacement?

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