Wildflower – First Steps:
Practice – 1, Project 2
Lecturer’s:
Neil Gallagher
Eden Anthony (Asst)
Wayne Robson
This is extremely odd but I was listening to a music video, it had an album cover with a foot and on the feet were leg bracelets. I was more focused on the leg and the feet rather than the jewelry I began by rigging the Character then posed it to look appealing. I then optimized the scene by isolating the legs. Up next I brought the legs into Z-brush and sculpted the details. Since I am more into tech art this project is more like my first step into learning unreal engine blueprints and then unreal PCG to scatter GEO on a terrain. Its procedural its faster and requires minimal effort. As always, I will be creating from scratch.
(Note – This project will be using substance materials from Noir showing how we can use materials that can be used to speed up the pipeline, materials that are modular and can adapt. It works more like a preset that benefits in the long-run).
PCG is the process of using the PCG Framework to distribute (“scatter”) points across a surface such as a landscape, static mesh, or spline and then spawning assets (like foliage or rocks) at those point locations. Now that is said and done let’s try and get into the nitty gritty details. The process is as shown below.
Sculpt and BPR rendering. Assets aren’t optimized in this scenario the poly count isn’t too high nor too low. My primary focus was the render and to see how the scene performs including the GPU load. Something the I have noticed in forums that is a major concern. I’m more keen on learning what Hi-Gen is, which dynamically scatters assets only when the player is within a certain distance, optimizing performance for massive worlds. Although I’m not sure it would be needed in this scene.
The pose:
Show below is the sculpt.
We will be using the same setup from Noir, a preview attached below.
Legs flat shaded and wire-frame.
The terrain was made in Houdini, its simply a height-field.
Initially, I did try setting it up in Houdini and I failed as it was 30000 points and wouldn’t scatter on both my device and the UNI’s. So I resorted to learning PCG in unreal engine.
The node graph is as shown below, I wish I could use a lightbox to make sure you can view more but there is just so much you can do to optimize and save on load time. I genuinely dont know if it is me or the the devices but here are the nodes.
Moving on to the textures !! Here is the substance I-Ray render.
Moving on to the PCG setup, I am posting the graph here. I couldn’t find any right or wrong way to do it, as there are several so I am posting it here !!
After scattering the GEO that I got from polyraven I ended up rendering and color correcting it. Posted below are the two results.
Learning Outcome
This is what I have learned, I have learned that I can use PCG to develop not just terrain but textures and subtle details in Unreal. There was more to this project but I couldn’t do it as the points kept positioning themselves in another location. Originally for the presentation I intended it to scatter blue and red flowers on the terrain hence the name WILDFLOWER. However I am content so far because its the learning that counts and what knowledge I have gained while researching procedural systems in Unreal and Houdini.
References:
- Epicgames.com. (2024). Epic Games. [online] Available at: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/pcg-development-guides.
- Sidefx.com. (2026). Scatter. [online] Available at: https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/scatter.html [Accessed 12 Jan. 2026].
