Houdini-Made Stylized Jungle Assets With No Textures
Jarred Everson shared a glimpse of his latest work.
Jarred Everson
Senior Technical Artist Jarred Everson presented his work created at Gas Giant Games using Houdini and the Tree Generator toolset from SideFX Labs. The example demonstrates how tree roots deform around rock formations, while the generator can also be applied to vegetation such as the ferns. These assets don't rely on a traditional UV/texture workflow, with all colors handled through vertex colors.
As the artist explained, this approach was influenced by the game's visual style, which leaned into a low-polygon aesthetic. It also simplified the production workflow and provided runtime memory savings, freeing up resources for other aspects of the game.
Here are more of the environment assets, all driven by vertex colors generated and applied in Houdini. The team apparently calls this art style "Grittygonal":
"Root input for terrain shapes can be polygon or image-based, fed into height fields. Vertex colors, mesh processing, and collision meshes are generated procedurally. Trees and bushes generated using standard SideFX Labs nodes," commented Jarred Everson.
Everson now left his role at Gas Giant Games and joined Riot Games, but if you're interested in seeing more of the "Grittygonal" project, Creative Director and Co-Founder Julian Love has been sharing demos on LinkedIn:
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