Procedural Terrain System
A procedural terrain workflow for building environments quickly while preserving artistic control.
Problem
Creating terrain by hand for every scene made iteration slow and inconsistent. It was difficult to:
- Maintain a cohesive look across multiple environments
- Populate terrain with vegetation and props in a way that respected slope and readability
Approach
I built a node-based terrain generation system that combined controlled randomness with artist-friendly overrides:
- Baseform generation to establish macro shapes and visual rhythm
- Flattening operators for roads, buildings, and points of interest
- Slope-aware masking to drive biome placement and prop density
This structure enabled fast exploration while still allowing targeted edits when a scene required specific composition beats.
Tools
- Houdini
Result
The system reduced environment setup time and made look development more consistent. It produced readable terrains with:
- More predictable art direction outcomes
- Faster iteration on layout and landmark placement
- Cleaner procedural distribution of vegetation and props based on slope and terrain rules