Overview
I plan to make a 3D simulated city in Houdini and Unreal Engine. It would include buildings, roads, cars, etc., and ideally the traffic simulation. The player would control a character and walk inside the city. My inspiration was the demo to showcase the ability of UE5 when it released, The Matrix Awaken (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU0gvPcc3jQ&t=497s ). It includes an entire 3D environment and an interactive crowd and traffic system that responds to the player’s actions. I would like to do something like this which can be used in movie or game productions.
Tech
Some of the key techniques I could think of now are: 1) procedural generation of roads, buildings, props, etc. 2) detailed 3D assets production including modeling, texturing, etc. 3) An algorithm to simulate traffic. An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU9VBX3yjX8
Aesthetics
I’d like to make a city in the style of my hometown Shenzhen, China. I want to take the project as a chance not only to showcase my technical ability that can be put in my portfolio, but also to express my artistic ideas. I’m always proud of the urban design of my hometown and I want to bring the beauty of the city to more people who don’t know it. I don’t want to rebuild the real city in my project because it involves a different method of production – I’d need to collect the data of the city and transform it into something usable in the engine, and it’s a completely different technical approach which isn’t what I want to do; also, I think making a fictional city in the style of a real city is more interesting. A lot of movies and games (for example, GTA 5) do this. The related elements of the reference city bring a lot of fun for the player to explore.
Critical Viewpoint
The project is critical in both technical and aesthetic ways.
Tech: Traditionally, when the developer wants to produce a city for a movie or a game, they have to make all the buildings manually which takes an impossible amount of work. With the development of technology, now people can do it with 3D scanning, generation algorithms, etc., but they’re still relatively new and are only used in big companies with sophisticated technologies. I believe procedural generation is a super useful skill to learn – it greatly increases productivity and makes open-world video games possible. By learning and handling the skill in my project, I want to show its potential and encourage more developers to learn the technology.
Aesthetics: As an artist, I hope to introduce the beauty of my home city to people aesthetically and interestingly. There are a lot of famous open-world games like GTA and Red Dead Redemption that set their story in US cities, and their aesthetics are widely spread and appreciated. It must be great to show something different, to provide a chance for people to learn about a different city style that is rarely exposed in public overseas.
Timeline
Week 1 - Brainstorming
Week 2 - Study Houdini: follow tutorial #1 ep 1-10
Week 3 - Study Houdini: follow tutorial #1 ep 10-20
Week 4 - Follow tutorial #2 and start creating the city
Week 5 - Finish tutorial #2 with the city prototype finished in Houdini
Week 6 - Study Unreal Engine and the workflow to import Houdini project into Unreal
Week 7 - Finish Unreal tutorial
Week 8 - Import the city prototype into Unreal, have correct modeling and collisions
Week 9 - Finalize lighting, rendering, sky box, etc
Week 10 - Add character and make the game run