Procedural Village
For my final project at BCIT’s Technical Art program, I created a Tool Kit to generate a Village procedurally. The kit includes a Modular Building Tool, a Fence Tool (which can also be used for most spline generation), a Biome Mask Generation and many other minor elements to facilitate the environment creation.
The tools allow the user to change the meshes and values through Data Assets making it easier and faster to manipulate the environment. Modifiers are applied on a per-mesh basis, allowing change in weight, offset, rotation and scale. All the elements are projected on the landscape and can have their normal projection turned on/off.
For the Modular Building Tool, since it requires more precision, I used sockets on the Static Meshes to indicate the location for the “attachments” (door, window, chimney and roof beam). The houses can also be attached and the attachments will not be generated in the area blocked by the other building.
Lastly for the Biome Mask Tool, I used a 2D Capture of only the landscape and set up the landscape so each layer has 2 different textures connected (the actual texture that is visible when played, and the colour chosen for its mask). the user can turn the mask on and off as needed and can generate the mask to be placed on the PCG Biome Tool from Unreal Engine 5.
Possible Improvements
While working on my project I noticed many possible improvements that could be made, unfortunately, every production has its time limitations and most of them had to be set aside.
Some of them were: using PCG for Landscape generation and more precise modifications like creating rivers and lakes, hierarchical generation of PCG actors, modifying Landscape material through PCG, and including VFX elements on the generation (smoke coming out of the chimney, and small lights for windows).