How Embark Studios Built Procedural Environments For THE FINALS Using Houdini

In THE FINALS, destruction goes beyond visuals, it's a core part of the gameplay. Buildings aren't just scenery: they serve as cover and tactical tools. Adrian Björkerud, a Technical Artist at Embark Studios, recently detailed how the team used Houdini to build large environments, including the game's signature fully destructible buildings and asset fracturing workflows.

Adrian joined Embark Studios in 2020, when the team was just 10-20 people. Even early on, they knew the game would feature arenas inspired by real-world locations, with a variety of fully destructible buildings. This posed two main challenges: updating destructible assets was slow and resource-heavy, and the team needed a flexible system to handle any architectural style worldwide.

Drawing on experience from previous destruction-heavy games, Adrian realized that manual setups would make iteration tedious. To solve this, he developed a procedural Houdini toolset that automated repetitive work while keeping artistic control. This system eventually became Building Creator.

From the start, Building Creator wasn't a single all-in-one HDA. It evolved into a modular toolset of interoperable HDAs, where artists assemble buildings by combining reusable Feature Nodes, each generating a specific element like walls, floors, roofs, windows, or doors.

Every building created with the toolset starts from a blockout mesh. Building Creator uses this mesh as shared spatial context, allowing each Feature Node to interpret the building consistently.

In most games, buildings are often just facades, since players never enter them. In THE FINALS, players can explore, traverse, and even stand on every part of a structure. This requires complete interiors, hallways, staircases, rooms, and attics, all with accurate collision. Also, destructible geometry must be pre-fractured. Real-time fracturing is too costly and unpredictable for fast-paced multiplayer gameplay. In THE FINALS, all assets are fractured in Houdini, with seams hidden until damage occurs, such as from gunfire or explosions.

Some locations required special attention. For example, the team added a dedicated Kyoto Roof Feature Node to the toolset to accurately capture the layered and intricate design of traditional Japanese roofs.

Interestingly, the Monaco map became a major challenge when Embark Studios realized that the large number of interior spaces could confuse players: the map features over 30 unique buildings, each with one to five floors plus an attic.

To address this, a consistent interior ruleset for all Monaco buildings was created. The ground-floor entrance always opens into a hallway with a staircase on the left and an exit door on the right for easy passage, while a hatch at the top of the stairs always leads to the attic. This allowed players to quickly navigate any Monaco building, even though each had its own unique facade and details.

The Building Creator toolset was also used beyond THE FINALS, most notably for Buried City, the sand-covered Italian town in ARC Raiders. For this map, the tools generated only the base building meshes, as the game doesn't have fully destructible environments.

Using Building Creator, buildings can go from blockout to fractured asset in just 4-6 minutes per change. The system has produced over 100 unique buildings across THE FINALS and ARC Raiders, with collision and occluders fully automated and requiring no manual work.

Read the article to learn more about how Building Creator works. Don't forget to subscribe to our Newsletter and join our 80 Level Talent platform, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, and Instagram, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.