World Weaver : Procedural Generation of Real World Terrains
World Weaver is our 3rd-Year and Final Project, it is a tool directed not only to environment artists but also geared towards other domains such as cinema, architecture...
World Weaver is a procedural terrain generator who allows to quickly and easily generate terrains based on real-world based Data. All you have to do is choose a point on Google Maps, input the coordinates of said point in the tool and it will automatically generate your terrain with automatic HLODs, Streaming, Masks and Textures, Ready-To-Play directly in Unreal Engine 5.
My name is Titien GUILLANTON, I was in charge of the Houdini pipeline as well as assisted in the creation of the materials on Unreal. For this project I was teamed up with Hector BLOCH (in charge of Python and interacting with APIs) and later on, Georges DURRUTY (in charge of creating the master materials in Unreal).
One of the biggest focuses of World Weaver was its ease-of-use, so that any user could quickly get the hang of our tool, thus an experienced artist can decide to use a complex UI system to have access to all possible parameters, while a more neophyte user may want to use the Simpler UI which only gives them the most important parameters to generate their terrains.
Quality of Life was a heavy focus too. World Weaver interacts with an API, Python, Houdini and Unreal and we didn't want the user to have to do the back-and-forth between softwares. Thus, the user only has their UI directly in Unreal, once they click the Generate Terrain button, the Tool automatically loops through all needed steps and comes back to Unreal to generate the Terrain while the user didn't have to do anything else.
We currently have 4 Biomes : Forest, Snow, Desert and Rock, all Biomes have customizable masks via the Houdini HDA or the landscape tool directly for a more artistic approach. Currently the textures used are Quixel's but can easily be switched with your own.
