Leveraging Unreal Engine 5's PCG to Scatter Meshes on Meshes

Jack McKelvie, a Senior Environment Artist at the Quixel team at Epic Games, has recently shared a series of videos on ArtStation showcasing a recent R&D experiment with Unreal Engine 5's Procedural Content Generation (PCG), a great framework that lets the user quickly and easily populate their 3D scenes with assets.

With the goal being to create a diorama driven 100% by PCG, the author has set up a procedural staircase, loosely inspired by Uncharted 4, that randomizes the vegetation growing on it based on its world position. According to the artist, this experiment provided some valuable insights into best practices for scattering meshes on meshes within UE5. You can check out all of the videos by visiting Jack's ArtStaion page.

Last week, Senior Environment Artist Rodrigo Castro also wowed us by leveraging the PCG toolset to set up Hidden Altar, a stunning mountainous landscape with Japanese vibes:

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:

Earlier, Senior Generalist Henry Yamin utilized the PCG framework in combination with SideFX's Houdini to set up a robust generator that can create a realistic 3D cliff in mere minutes and shared a detailed breakdown explaining how it was made.

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