LogInLearn how the Heart Machine team developed HyperDec, a procedural system that can populate terrain with props.
Game development studio Heart Machine, known for creating award-winning Hyper Light Drifter and Solar Ash games, has released a new 2-part blog post that many Procedural Artists will definitely find interesting.
In this blog post, Tech Artists Len White and Christian Sparks shared a lengthy breakdown of HyperDec, the team's procedural system that can evaluate the height of the terrain at a given XY position and procedurally populate those spaces with props. The system uses seed-informed deterministic random value selections for things like position, rotation, and scale, as well as parametric variation for things like space between props, maximum count, height and slope ranges, spawn area, etc.
The artists explained how the system was built using Houdini and Unreal Engine, how they modernized it to increase its procedural capabilities, spoke about generating terrain using HyperDec, talked about shoreline generation, shared tons of visuals that should help you understand how the system works and what it can do, and much more.
You can read the entire blog post here.