UNREAL ENGINE 5.2
Jingtian Li shows you how to leverage the new Procedural Content Generation tools in Unreal Engine 5
Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills
Procedural modelling has been on the rise in recent years, with Houdini leading the charge as the go-to software for proceduralism and VFX. But other 3D content creation tools are catching up and offering their own solutions. During this year’s Game Developers Conference, Epic Games unveiled its new inhouse tool, Procedural Content Generation (PCG), within Unreal Engine 5, sparking discussions and inspiring new creative works.
PCG empowers artists to establish rules for generating environments procedurally in the Unreal Editor, allowing for real-time adjustments. Despite still being in its early stages, PCG presents a compelling alternative to Houdini and Houdini Digital Assets due to its integration and elimination of the need for additional software.
The tools show performance advantages, using a node-based workflow similar to Houdini. This grants access to point data and enables custom attribute creation and manipulation, as well as randomisation and scattering. It’s impor tant to note the current version is mainly focused on instantiating assets rather than creating them from scratch. However, Unreal Engine does offer other facilities to model geometries procedurally.
For this tutorial, readers are expected to know the basics of Unreal Engine 5 and the Blueprint Editor. Knowledge of Houdini can be helpful, but isn’t required.
01 PREPARE THE TESTING ASSETS
A landscape is needed as the starting point of our project, it’s advised to create a small enough landscape from a new basic level instead of the default large openworld level. A river is also added to allow the population of different assets in the river area. The shape of the landscape is applied with a simple noise brush.
I’d encourage you to spend more time refining its shape or get the Heightmap generated with third-party software. We’ll start scattering points to instantiate the trees on the landscape next.
02 BASIC SCATTERINGS
Create a folder called ‘PCG/PCG_Forest’ in the Content Browser, right-click, and select PCG>PCG Graph. Name the newly created graph ‘PCG_Forest’ and open it. The central area of the window with the Input and Output nodes is the graph that will form the basis of our pr
