I had the enormous pleasure of working with Meso Design, and leading the environment art work on Kurpfalzisches Museums' brand new interactive exhibit running in Unreal, The "Discovery Station": https://meso.design/en/news/high-definition-portal-to-ancient-times
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I was responsible for the 100 km² of Natural Scenery, which was created with the aid of satellite data, historical references, and a photo-grammetry trip to the region. Weeks were spent researching and collecting reference, every species of plant was carefully selected and spawned according to realistic Biomes, which were created with guidance from the researchers at the Museum.
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All of the trees were created using my own tools inside Houdini, which combines scanned data and parameterized L-Systems, automatically setting up LODS, Wind and Octahedral Imposters. I opted to build my own tool, because given the size of the landscape and density of the forests, I knew that having complete control over the end result was crucial for performance. In the end, the scene contains over 3 Million trees. There are 40 different varieties comprising 4 species.
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The terrain itself was produced using a 30M precision base-map sourced from satellite data, which was detailed first inside of World Creator and Quixel Mixer. The Rivers were created inside of Houdini, using a simple image as a guide, but with layers of procedural refinement, such as conforming to slopes and automated meandering.
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For our small team to work concurrently, we found ourselves in need of a non-destructive and multi-user approach to landscape editing, so along with a custom landscape material, which used both the new Layers system and Virtual Textures, I developed a render target based blueprint system to enable multiple users to work on the same landscape tile at once. This system handles terrain deformation, material layers, and grass spawning.
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Megascans and Epic Games Marketplace resources were used to handle the groundplants, shrubs and volumetric clouds.
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The natural environment is packed with detail, and runs consistently above 60fps at 3440x1440 on an RTX2080TI. The exhibit can be played today by visitors to the Kurpfälzisches Museum in Heidelberg.
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Thank you to the team at Meso for bringing me on board, and to the Kurpfälzisches Museum for presenting the opportunity to build this wonderful exhibit. Enormous credit must go to https://www.artstation.com/belacsampai, for crafting the many beautiful artifacts, structures, and other man-made elements that bring the historical world to life.