God of War Foliage LOD tool

Created
Jan 10, 2024 11:26 AM
Software
Houdini
Unreal
Key Words
Houdini, Unreal, Asset, LOD
Category
Art Tool

Pics and Vids

An example projection plane result.
An example projection plane result.
 
Video preview
Video Showcase

Description

Based on God of War sharing in GDC 2019, I recreated the foliage LOD tool for out use. I managed to pack it into a single HDA and we used it for generating LOD of large foliage in games.
 
Technical Brief
On Geo level:
notion image
The algorithm is pretty much the same as Sean shared in 2019. However, for anime-style games, we need to bake the spherical normal. The tool involves two passes, the first is the model generation, and the second will be the texture generation. This tool is good since it can reuse the wind animations from the materials. Before the LOD models don’t have proper wind animations.
 

Reference

  1. Billboard Clouds for Extreme Model Simplification ( 2003 ) Xavier Décoret, Frédo Durand, François X. Sillion, Julie Dorsey
  1. Extreme Model Simplification for Forest Rendering ( 2005 ) Anton L. Fuhrmann, Eike Umlauf, Stephan Mantler
  1. Interactive Wind and Vegetation in God of War ( 2019 ), Sean Feeley