Naughty Dog Artist Created Procedural Nature Environment in UE4

Environment Texture Artist Jacob Norris shared with Polycount his new incredible technology that allows you to build almost completely procedurally generated nature environments in Unreal Engine 4. The results of his hard work are published on his ArtStation page and it looks absolutely amazing. Check it out!

Here’s a little piece of the technology’s description from Polycount:

There is also procedural moss placement on assets, like the rocks and tree trunks, procedural color variations of grass and leaf textures, and some vertex painted moss as well. The branches can be adjusted by – the number of branches, the angle of the branches, the angle variance of the branches, twist of the tree trunk, the amount of wind applied to them, and the ability to select separate branch models for each spline in place in the scene. The branches will randomize their position and rotation so no two will ever be exactly the same.

The rivers are all spline generated as well with a material that increases the speed of the river based off of the normal angles of the geo and adds foam to the water at the tops and base of any waterfalls which is calculated using the tangent angles of the spline.

Jacob Norris, Naughty Dog

Of course, there’s a nice video depicting all the peculiarities of the project. There’s wind blowing, the river flowing, the grass moving.

Jacob wants to expand on some of the techniques with the splines and materials that he used for this, and share it with the UE4 community. It’s an absolutely unbelievable feature and we hope to see it available someday for all the developers working with games.

Check out Jacob’s Artstation page. There’s a lot of cool goodies over there.

Source: polycount.com