Ivy Generator W1

Throughout my summer I was doing a lot of high poly hard surface modeling and found it a lot more enjoyable than expected, however when I started looking at the available jobs I found a lot more tech art positions than prop/environment artists. On top of that when I did my skills audit I believe I'm closer to a tech art position rather than anything else. All of these variables are pointing me into refining my tech art skills.

For my specialism I want to challenge myself and create an incredibly diverse tool that can encapsulate many different foliage types, from tree roots to sprawling ivies. The tool will allow artists to quickly create overgrown scenes with a couple of clicks instead of spending hours placing and adjusting premade packs of ivy. The user will be able to change the length, number of offshoots, leaf type and seasons.

The specific ivy I will be focusing on is the hedera helix also known as the English common Ivy. It'll be made semi realistic so it can merge seamlessly with paragon assets to create a small scene showcasing its flexibility.

The reason I decided to go with foliage based tech is because most of games' geometry is assigned to grass and trees. This makes it extremely important that foliage is as optimized as it can. With grass taking up so much bandwidth a lot of research and innovation comes out of that field. Recently it's become more efficient to use single strands of grass per plane than a clump of grass in a plane. This comes from vertex's being progressively cheaper in comparison to overdrawing and stressing out the GPU.

Tech in foliage breakdown in HZD (big file)

The ivy growing on the trees isn't modular and was probably placed by hand or distributed with Houdini. I will be using Horizon Zero Dawn as a benchmark for my work. Since the ivy wasn't made in engine procedurally my result won't look as realistic and natural as it does in the picture, but that doesn't mean that I can't get close to their result.

This image will be my main point of reference and I'll try to replicate its growing behaviour procedurally inside of unreal.

artboard and brief