This was my first term project at Vancouver Institute of Media Arts, we had to create a car game and get used to the pipeline of creating a complete game in just a few weeks. Wanting a challenge I decided to create a houdini Tool that would automatically assign vertex paint to the terrain that would be generated with a height map created randomly with a seed inside of unreal.

Coding the Gameplay

Gameplay for this game was fairly easy, i had to model a nice car inside of maya and set the wheels as childs of the body for the car, inside of unreal just adjust the physics and give it basic inputs like acceleration and brakes, then made 2 players, and added a simple start and finish line to decide who would win, if you fall down the canyon you will lose.

The Houdini Tool

This was the first time i ever used houdini so figuring out all the inner workings of that software was pretty fun! but basically the terrain tool wil work in a very easy way, it will ask the user how big of a map you want and giving different size values that are tied to unreal engines landscape sizes to a random noise pattern, after that ill play a bit with erode nodes and different masking maps so each part of the map has different texture information, rock in the mountains very high up, grass in flatter zones and dirt or gravel in the in between parts and different slopes. this tool then goes into the engine and with unreals curve tools i created a track on top of the generated terrain and just flattened the terrain where the track went to.