SideFX Project Pegasus

[novel roost]

The "sequel" to Project Titan, Pegasus is another showcase of whats possible when combining the awesome power of Unreal and Houdini.

This time, with a fantastical setting, the focus is a large exterior environments and landscape.

We'll be sharing all of the tools, documentation and WIP details as we proceed!

For now, here's my second blog post, talking about the problems I've been having building a new set of foliage tools.

As we proceed, we'll be breaking down how we used for Houdini for everything, as well as cutting edge landscape workflows with Unreal Engien 5.

https://www.artstation.com/blogs/b00merang/gbXa/sidefx-project-pegasus-2-foliage-foibles

[tender kindle]

Is this gonna involve world partition and cover the potential problems of HDAs generating content covering multiple cells? or is this just one relatively small level again
I'm generally interested in map wide open world oriented tools, as most of the uses I've seen for UE open world games using houdini seem to involve generating data and content completely outside of unreal and then importing it (ie Embark doing a lot of their landscape editing completely in houdini then importing that instead of doing it directly in UE's editor with houdini asset actors)

[novel roost]

Without wanting to overly commit in a specific direction- we are currently using worldpartition, and we'll be sure to share exactly what we get up to.

My personal take is that I prefer working on the terrain outside of unreal where I have the full suite of tools available to me and can focus 100% on maximising quality.

However, working directly in unreal does have some advtanges when it comes to collaboration, so we're currently exploring in that direction too.

[tender kindle]

if you're working outside of unreal I'm still kinda interested in the process, especially updating the existing UE side landscape after every iteration & stuff like that

[novel roost]

Figured out a cool workflow for creating global colour maps in Houdini LD

[tender kindle]

is this like, an extra mask that's used by the material to tint the textures it's already sampling? or is it just a generated mask to decide which texture to sample ie grass, sand or rock etc

also that's some hella cool looking terrain

[novel roost]

Good guesses!

[tender kindle]

oh also, is that a heightfield generated entirely inside houdini? if so is there gonna be a blog post or something on it as well?

[novel roost]

In this blog post I share more information about how we generated terrain colour maps inside of Houdini

https://www.artstation.com/blogs/b00merang/KOXN/sidefx-project-pegasus-3-authoring-terrain-colour-maps-in-houdini

[novel roost]

Yes there'll be a tonne more info about how we did everything released over the coming months

[wide basin]

The tree generation tool looks really great, is it going to be a replacement for the current lab tools for generating trees in Houdini? Really well done 🙂

[novel roost]

Thanks! and no comment at this time regrading labs tree tools 2.0 haha

[wide basin]

👍🏻

[open hearth]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7HJ_7Pf0mE

[sharp birch]

Nice

[novel roost]

Thanks for sharing the trailer! I just came here to do so myself 😄 If you have any questions or thoughts pleae fire away in youtube comments, I'm more likely to see and respond there 😄

[open hearth]

No problem, have been looking forward to this (and other things) for a while ^_^ When you're ready to launch, we can have you and Ian, Feike, Alex and Tilman come in and do a https://discord.com/channels/187217643009212416/1151880158492496014 session, show off what all it does, maybe a bit of Q&A

[novel roost]

Sounds awesome, we'd love to!

Btw, livestream starts in 7-ish hours! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMSVPoGrQn8&ab_channel=Houdini

[open hearth]

Already have it locked in for notifications and alarms

Good luck and hope the stream goes well!

[edgy robin]

looking forward to this, loved your godlike terrain series

[novel roost]

Thanks 😊

[bright tundra]

Excellent addition to your previous work with material layers and landscapes, very much appreciated!

[tender kindle]

is there a full download of the unreal project & hip files yet? the videos are great but I also want to just like, dig into all of it

[bright tundra]

https://www.sidefx.com/pegasus/ has the currently available project files and release dates for the additional parts @tender kindle

[tender kindle]

does the landscape technical deep dive files include everything from the previous parts as well or do I have to download all of it individually

nvm I tried downloading those and it's only the hip files relevant to these specific videos

[bright tundra]

lesson 2 has the majority of what you need I think

[tender kindle]

seems like it, I'll try those then thank you

[bright tundra]

You're welcome! The technical deep dive and accompanying download contains HDAs that are included in the main landscape workflow project file from lesson 2 along with a hip file. You can follow along with the technical deep dive from any project once you have the Project Pegasus package from lesson 2 set up in houdini though.

[tender kindle]

I just saw that there's no map included, I was hoping to be able to check out the final landscape right away
I'm still gonna continue watching the videos as they're really good but prolly gonna wait for some kind of full project download if that's ever gonna happen

[bright tundra]

the example landscape and an IDmap has already been baked, you use the HDAs in the Unreal content folder to import it. Everything you need to follow along with the tutorials that have been released so far is included. Technically, you don't need to do anything from the houdini side to get the landscape up and running in UE. (there are a few issues in the initial release but all relatively easy to resolve)

Do continue watching the tutorials, the idea is teach the workflow and give you the tools you need to use it. I'm not sure if there will be a final project that won't require following along with the tutorials to some degree and we already have the most critical piece of the puzzle imo.

[novel roost]

Thanks @bright tundra, I appreciate the support!

There are indeed some kinks in the initial release - although the project files have just been updated so when first setting up the material it should go a little more smoothly.

We will package up the environment at some point and publish it, we may tidy up an unreal project for curious artists to dig into at some later date 🙂

[tender kindle]

I'm 100% gonna continue watching the tutorials, I've already been reproducing some of the already showcased stuff in my own projects, I just like digging into example projects more than following big tutorials most of the time

the terrain blockout part alone has been hugely useful I wasn't really good at it until now

also I didn't watch 100% of the workflow tutorial yet but am I correct to assume that the ID map baking workflows makes it hard if not impossible to paint terrain material masks in engine?

[bright tundra]

thanks for the update, will check it out!

[novel roost]

@tender kindle You're right in thinking that it complicates it a bit. We worked around that with a slightly convoluted render target solution using the existing landscape paint layers, which didn't make the cut for this first batch of tutorials.

With custom editor modes now possible, it should be easier to streamline the solution to something more straightforward to use and I hope to share that later.

[tender kindle]

maybe you couldve used "placeholder" weight layers? ie weight layers for each textures that exist in the material but aren't used for final rendering, only to allow painting them and sending them over to houdini, then use them as override in the id map baking wherever any of the weights is over 0

very interested in that custom editor thingy though, custom tools in unreal beyond editor widgets I kinda don't know where to start from to make

[novel roost]

That's effectively what we're doing, but we use render targets to composite them live into the idmap via an editor widget.

[tender kindle]

neat

would require rebaking manually after every houdini generated idmap reimport then? unless the final id map is a separate asset and the editor tool automatically detects when it's outdated or smth

[novel roost]

You basically have the solution down already 😉 it was fun to set up and easy enough to use. We had two textures, source and live, and when leaving the edit mode we switched to a baked static texture. There is an hlsl node which parses all the weights to the id values, very similar to vex.

[tender kindle]

that's really cool

I may have figured out the principles but I have no idea how I'd actually make that myself tho, I gotta look into how editor modes work

[novel roost]

We did it with an editor widget, but the more "elegant" version would use a mode where you can paint on the landscape directly to the idmap RT without needing the intermediary weights, We didn't do that yet though

[tender kindle]

like, the editor widget displays a top down version of the terrain and you paint in that?

oh nvm

[novel roost]

No, editor modes allow you to ray into the world through the viewport and return hit uvs, world coords and whatnot 🙂 clicks and strokes and all that good stuff

[tender kindle]

does it make it easier to display other stuff in the 3d view too like brush outlines and whatnot?

[novel roost]

That I don't know, but I guess yes! If you find out first let me know 😛

[tender kindle]

I genuinely can't find any kind of documentation for custom editor mode so that ain't happening any time soon

[novel roost]

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/1loo/unreal-engine-scriptable-tools-editor-mode

[tender kindle]

thank you

[bright tundra]

just wanted to mention that TA_Masks and TA_Normal appear to have changed source format to TSF BGRA8 instead of TSF RGBA32F in the updated files

[novel roost]

Ooof... Thanks for the heads up

[bright tundra]

no problem, I don't envy having to package up a project like this 😅

[tender kindle]

I'm curious, was there any plan for rivers and other "inland" water bodies? I feel like the common procedural water placement/flowmap calculation workflows could use some research & improvement