This is a game developed in 18 hours with my team for the Three Thing Game Jam which is a Game Jam organised by the University. We used SpatialOS networking framework laong with Unity engine to develop a multiplayer first person shooter game.

Me and one other teammate were responsible for making the entire environment assets. I started with the cave which was supposed to be very large. In order to do it in a short amount of time and with decent quality I painted in Photoshop a black and white top down layout of the cave which then I exported in Maya and I transformed into a mesh by keeping the white parts and removing the black ones. The mesh was then imported into Houdini were I procedurally generated the cave walls. The final steps was adding a few operations for cleaning, reducing, re-triangulating, computing the normals and then exporting the mesh to Unity. There was no UV map generated because I made a tri-planar shader which uses 3 sets of textures from Megascans in order to make the cave look authentic and realistic.

By integrating Houdini in our pipeline we were able to iterate and quickly accommodate design decisions that appeared quite late in the development, like a room was too short, too large, or was having too many stalagmites. In a traditional pipeline consisting of Maya, Max or other similar DDC tools a change like this will propagate to a lot of work and changes required which would be unsuitable for a game jam where development time is extremely limited.

Initial layout of the cave painted in Photoshop in black and white.

The ouput of the Houdini tool after processing the layout image.