Industrial Scintillator

This real-time Unreal Engine environment cinematic was created to explore the concept of scaling up experimental laboratory equipment to a heavy duty industrial context. The structure is aged, with signs of nature and exposure to the outside environment, but still standing, fulfilling its function actively.

What started as some after hours experiments grew into an expanded study of environment design, cinematography, vfx and lighting.
I created many tools and developed a flexible pipeline between Houdini and Unreal Engine, so I may add further scenes and narrative to this project over time.

Creative direction and versatility was the priority, but with an emphasis on using proceduralism and modularity where possible to facilitate the creative process, the 3D assets, VFX and even the music I created are based on procedural and emergent processes.

The base design emerged from exploration of different procedural modeling techniques in Houdini.
One of my goals was the development of a workflow for efficiently transferring Houdini scene data without the Houdini Engine plugin (to provide an alternative if working in a studio with in-compatibility between houdini / UE versions).
This was done by interpreting point cloud CSV data from Houdini in Unreal engine to load up instances and other arbitrary data.

The environment fog and niagara particle system are dynamic and procedural, being influenced and warped by geometry distance fields.

The music was created using analog Eurorack emulation software, VCV Rack 2. I wanted to create something vast that matched the sense of scale in the scene, but with underlying complexity and almost random electronic noise structures to hint at the underlying complexity behind the industrial complex.

Since this project I’ve already got a huge load of new ideas for designs, concepts, techniques and workflow enhancements, as an artist I always find that the most difficult challenge is filtering and planning a prioritized path forward through the cloud of ideas and inspiration.

Resources:

Houdini + Labs / game dev tools

Unreal Engine 5.2 - Blueprints, Lumen, nanite, movie render queue

VCV Rack -
https://vcvrack.com/

Houdini labs CSV exporter - https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/out/labs--csv_exporter.html

More info on using CSV data from houdini to unreal - https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/Gj/unreal-engine-importing-coordinates-for-automatic-static-mesh-placement