The Matrix Awakens
I had the great pleasure to work with the Epic special project team on the Matrix Awakens experience as Lead procedural artist. For one year and a half we have helped for the development of Unreal Engine 5 and used Houdini to create a full procedural virtual city of 16 km2 that would be inspired by San Francisco, Chicago and New York. Our goal was to achieve a maximum of realism at the smallest possible scale while producing a giant explorable open world to serve as a platform for the Matrix experience.
The city has 260 km of roads, 512 km of sidewalks, 7000 unique buildings and 1248 intersections, while using 8 000 000 instances.
If you are interested in the creation process, I invite you to watch the detailed description of our procedural workflow that I am presenting on the Unreal channel here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usJrcwN6T4I
The Unreal project and the Houdini files are also available for download on the Epic Market place here, you will find the Houdini assets zipped at the root of the installation folder :
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/learn/city-sample?lang=en-US
This has been one of my biggest and certainly most interesting career project. Special Kudos to the rest of the procedural team at Epic Games for their colossal effort : Robert Osborne, Votch Levi, Christian Sirois.
And to our beloved Art Director :
https://www.artstation.com/feaneroh
5 x 4 km city
New York side of town
each asset in the city is very highly detailed and count several hundreds thousands of triangles
Lumen does all the work for the night lighting. Here just using the self illumination from the building interiors.
Details are featured to the centimeter.
A look at the final point cloud generated out of Houdini, this would later imported to Unreal and replaced by corresponding modules to create the final result of the city.
A visualization of the basic volume of the buildings later procedurally subdivided with modules to make the realistic buildings.
the lot subdivided with their respective building styles.
a quick look at the audio data that we have managed to extract from our procedural flow, the color represent the amount of reverb you can find at any given point in the city.
a look at the lot subdivision and the New York style staggered subdivision
this represent the pedestrian density data over the city
A look at the road decal procedurally generated mesh
A look at the actual ground point cloud, 2.5 millions points scattering, sidewalk and ground module, for a final poly count of 1.25 trillions polys.
A look at our biome scattering process
How the roads are subdivided to fit any length possible
the roads are then used to generate traffic lane for the AI traffic in the city.
The point cloud for the smaller road decal scattering.
A final look at some complex procedural marking in the downtown area.