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A year ago, Epic Games stole the headlines by introducing a brand-new Procedural Content Generation (PCG) framework with the release of Unreal Engine 5.2. Featuring in-editor tools and a runtime component, the PCG toolset allows defining rules and parameters to populate large scenes with Unreal Engine assets, greatly accelerating the process of creating large worlds.
Since its introduction, numerous Technical Artists have had the chance to experiment with PCG, utilizing its capabilities to set up procedural cliff generators, game level and worldbuilding tools, forest and garden generators, and much more. Unreal Technical Artist and Virtual Production Developer Jim Bachalo has recently also tested out the framework, proving that PCG's capabilities aren't limited to landscape creation and environment art.
Eager to explore the potential of PCG, the artist has set up a cool crowd system that lets the user quickly and easily generate huge crowds of people in real-time, perfect for populating large digital environments and game levels. "Potential use cases would be previs, postvis, and final pixel background crowds for virtual production," commented the creator.
Additionally, the author leveraged Vertex Animation Textures (VATs) to breathe life into the models and make their idle animations feel lifelike and genuine. At the moment, it appears that the system was conceived primarily for Jim's personal experimentation, suggesting that its release as a downloadable add-on for UE5 is not happening anytime soon.
And if you would like to learn more about UE5's Procedural Content Generation toolset, here are a couple of great tutorials that will help you get started:
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In this tutorial, you will be going over on how to create 4 very different materials from scratch in SD. The goal of these courses is to teach you a solid workflow that we also use in the AAA game industry.