Procedural World Population
Populating the world procedurally required learning a lot about node-based coding in Unreal Engine 5 and generating point clouds. I worked through numerous tutorials to wrap my head around these techniques. These include but are not limited to the following the following sources:
PCG basic Save Days! Procedural Content Generation Framework (PCG) – Photoreal Landscape Tutorial
PCG and spline 7 Minute Photoreal Forest! Procedural Content Generation PCG in Unreal Engine
PCG theory Procedural Content Generation Overview | Unreal Engine 5.5 Documentation | Epic Developer Community
The images below are screenshots of my own notes, representing the process of the PCG implementation, consecutive stages, and exploratory work.
Procedural environment exploration result
The video below shows a screencast of manually exploring the world using keyboard navigation. The scene features an Australian landscape created using Pixel Pack assets and PCG techniques, including the spline technique. This approach allows for altering the landscape dynamically, such as adding a town in the middle of the terrain and a road running through the entire environment.
All of the assets used come from the Fab platform, which was encouraged by the module leader.