Houdini Engine in Unity Demonstration

This is a demonstration video of the project that I demo'd at the Side Effects Booth at Siggraph 2013 in Anaheim. My work on this project involved the creation of a procedural level building tool and voxel based BSP sculpting system that could not only work within Houdini, but also natively in the game engine Unity using the Houdini Engine API.

Based on my graduation project work, the generator is much faster in many respects and uses less then 3 gigabytes of memory.

Other updated components include the catwalks which now are not only much more efficient but also are capable of configuring themselves in a smart manner in order to ensure the player can always traverse them. This is done by fusing or removing parts of the catwalks if 2 surfaces or ramps overlap.

[jroek]

Truly amazing work here, thanks for sharing :)

[myxsys]

Thank you very much for this demo. Its helped me alot to make a decision on whether to learn houdini to make game assets

[hyperforce]

We had the choice to go with an axis aligned environment such as in my graduation project and make use of already existing methods I developed before. Or spend several weeks / months prototyping and rebuilding core systems to enable 360 directions.

While I wanted to try 360 degrees, because we only I had a few months to do this and several untested features on the side, we settled on the safer approach for the project.

[hyperforce]

That said, having axis aligned building kits is nothing abnormal and often very common. the trick is to hide the fact that your environment is build on a grid and composed out of similar parts.

Games that use axis aligned segments are to name a few, Skyrim (dungeons) or the Indoor environments of Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon.

The method used here uses plate style tiles, which is more flexible for BSP style construction, but it could be easily reconfigured to use a segment based approach instead.

[hyperforce]

The Houdini engine is a stand alone runtime library that can run Houdini assets in any program it is integrated with. The Unity Plug-in is still in internal testing and development, it will be released in the coming months.

If you wish to be the first user to test and use the Houdini engine you can sign up on the sidefx.com website under the sidefx Labs program.

[aramazhari]

Great job and certainly an amazing platform for prototyping. Is this on asset store?

[yathooo]

hi, im new to Houdini software, a dummy question

are you using a plugin for unity and a the Houdini Engine ?

i cudn find any plugin from Houdini Engine for unity3d

thanks

[vineetkumar]

is there any source where i can find a tutorial to do this from scratch???

[dino]

this is very important tool for game makers, i think this is what level designers really need.. a tool that help them make nice looking levels with minimal tweaking.

i find most devs who make game level like 3d platfomers or dungeons are doing same this tedious work over and over... i wonder why no one came up with tools like this.

indies would like to buy this assets (including my self), due to limited human resources, tools like this aids alot!

[alfredburns]

How does one obtain this? Is there somewhere to purchase it? I have Houdini engine and it is not included unless I don't know about it?

[GunTimeGames]

nice one man! (sorry i am late 2years ;D)

[kraphikd]

Very nice. With better textures you can sell it too

[pvcfsdevkidforcryengine.]

hmm, i absolutely dislike the structure and sense of this level, i never would like to "play" it.