Procedural Vine & Destruction Tool | Houdini Engine for Unreal
I developed this Houdini Digital Asset (HDA) to streamline the creation of overgrown, weathered/destroyed environments in Unreal Engine. The tool combines procedural vine growth with a custom destruction system, allowing artists to break meshes and "grow life" back into them simultaneously.
Key Features:
Dynamic Growth: Vines automatically pathfind along mesh surfaces and into cracks.
Focal Point Destruction: Precise control over where the mesh fractures.
Art-Directable Variations: Parameters for vine density, leaf scale, vine mesh, vine materials, and fracture randomness.
Real-time Interaction: Fully integrated via Houdini Engine for rapid level dressing.
Presentation video of the tool.
Beauty shot of the final HDA output on a weathered ship asset
Beauty shot of the final HDA output on a weathered ship asset
Beauty shot of the final HDA output on a weathered ship asset
Breakdown of procedural variations: Growth, Cracking, and Physical Destruction
Node graph of my tool
Real-time Vine Variation Test: Exploring different growth densities, materials and meshes.
Demonstration of the different crack variation types (Random vs. Focal Point).
The vine pathfinding logic is "destruction-aware." When the mesh fractures, the vine system dynamically updates to recognise new edges and debris when the destroyed mesh is within the input vine-growing space.