Artist-driven, fully automated world-building pipeline in under 60 seconds.

This project showcases a fully procedural world generation system developed using Houdini and Unreal Engine.
The entire pipeline is automated end-to-end, with no manual placement at any stage — from terrain and roads to districts, buildings, props, and PCG-driven environments.

The system is designed to support rapid iteration, scalability, and large world variety based on sketch inputs, rules, and DataTable-driven configuration.

Project Overview

The goal of this project was to build a robust procedural pipeline capable of generating diverse, large-scale worlds in a fast and controllable way. A core requirement was the development of high-speed algorithms for every stage, ensuring that extreme efficiency and near-instant processing remained a priority across the entire system.

All content is generated procedurally based on artist-defined inputs, rules, and parameters, allowing worlds to be rebuilt or modified in minutes without manual intervention.

The pipeline supports incremental updates, meaning individual components (such as props, layouts, or biomes) can be regenerated independently without recomputing the entire world.

My Role

This project was developed as part of a small core team at Exists.
My responsibility focused on the design and implementation of the procedural world generation systems, including:

• End-to-end procedural pipeline architecture with a focus on extreme performance.

• Houdini system design (Custom HDAs, VEX, and high-performance PDG workflows)

• Procedural terrain, road, and district generation

• Rule-based building placement and urban layout logic

• Gameplay-aware prop and spawn location systems

• Incremental rebuild logic for fast iteration

• Houdini ↔ Unreal Engine integration

• Unreal Engine PCG workflows and DataTable-driven control

I led the design and implementation of the procedural world-generation systems demonstrated in the video.

System Highlights

• Fully procedural, end-to-end world generation pipeline

• No manual placement at any stage of the process

• Artist-driven workflows with real-time iteration

• Rule-based district and building layout systems

• Street-aware building placement logic

• Gameplay-driven prop and spawn location generation

• Incremental updates without full system regeneration

• Advanced PDG-driven task parallelization, maximizing hardware utilization for massive scale environments.

• Universal PCG framework capable of generating a vast range of diverse biomes within a single, unified procedural pipeline.

Tools & Technologies

• Houdini — HDAs, VEX, PDG, Advanced Geometry Operators.

• Unreal Engine 5 — PCG, DataTables, Landscape, world integration

• Procedural data-driven pipelines

• Performance Engineering — Algorithmic optimization and parallel computing.

Project Disclaimer