Cave
A real time environment in UE5. I used Houdini to create all of the geometry—basically a large set of rocks and stalactites—and used PCG to place everything that isn't structural. PCG is really lovely for quick repetitive tasks such as, say, placing several thousand stalactites automatically on the ceiling. Everything is Nanite and extremely triangle dense. The water is using Unreal's single layer water shading model which is super easy and gives a pretty nice result with almost zero effort.
One of the PCG rock blueprints in the scene. The stalactites are placed on any surface of the rock with a downward facing normal.
Stalagmites and rocks on the floor of the cave are placed with volumes, with some parameters exposed to fine tune each group.
A small demonstration of how quick PCG can be used to make changes to an area. I compartmentalized each PCG graph/volume into a specific tool (pebbles, stalagmites, etc.) to have full control over the placement of each element.
An early blockout of the cave. It had many different rooms and I was going for a sort-of slow walking simulator type of thing to make a little playable demo, but eventually pared it back to focusing on PCG and Houdini.
Another early blockout area. The final cave changed substantially from these initial compositions.
An early lighting and water test.