This project was an exercise in working with Lidar point clouds, OSM data, and COPS.
The lidar data is from a US geological survey of the vermillion mountains. One large landscape was imported into Houdini in pieces and then stitched together. Next I imported smaller hero cliffs and projected them onto the main landscape to create a more interesting composition. Next I created various masks and output them into the various color channels of a texture in order to properly map materials to the terrain in Unreal.
The OSM data is a chunk of Athens that was downloaded from Open Street Maps. A tool was created in Houdini that separates the city into neighborhoods (City center, Middle income, and low income.) Based on these groupings I created varying heights, building styles, cabling and skybridges to visually seperate the different parts of the city.
Houdini's COPS was used to create the megastructure. As a base I used a sphere with its UVs separated into 4 identical stacked square islands. This allowed for lower resolution textures while maintaining a fidelity look.
Finally everything was imported into Unreal 5, many of the materials rely on tri-planer projections, while others (such as the roads, ships in the distance, and megastructure) were specifically UVed in order to have they're textures line up and scroll correctly.
The real end goal here was to create a full scene that relied heavily on open source data processing and randomization while remaining highly composed and coherent.