Artist-driven, fully automated world-building pipeline

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.
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

• Houdini system design (HDAs, VEX, 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

• Parallelized PDG workflows for performance and scalability

• PCG integration with layered, non-destructive updates

Tools & Technologies

• Houdini — HDAs, VEX, PDG, procedural geometry systems

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

• Procedural data-driven pipelines

• Performance-oriented system design

Project Context

This system was developed as a long-term R&D effort focused on scalable world generation.
While the underlying technology is complex, the primary goal was to keep the workflows intuitive and artist-friendly, allowing complex worlds to be generated through simple inputs and high-level control.

The project emphasizes automation, consistency, and flexibility — enabling the creation of many unique worlds using the same procedural foundation.

Video Notes

The video demonstrates:

• Artist-driven world input and generation

• Multiple unique worlds generated from the same pipeline

• Procedural roads, districts, and building layouts

• Incremental updates and PCG-driven environment changes

• Fully automated workflows without manual placement

Project Disclaimer