(music) (soothing music) - Far Cry 5 is set in Montana, and we had this cult that has been invading this particular region, and the goals of the game, for sure, is to liberate this
region from the bad guys. (soothing music) Montana, we have those
really vast, open space. We have forests that are
scattered through the land, in a really specific fashion. We also have big mountain
range with really tall cliffs. So in this new title in the series we wanted to push the
realism to the next level. To achieve that, we wanted to
really be able to reproduce natural phenomena that
we can observe in nature. And just to make the world more believable and more credible to the players. The overall usage of Houdini
within Ubisoft Montreal has grown quite a lot. I think all major projects with
open worlds are using it now. On the Far Cry brand,
we have Far Cry Primal. That was from the first
project to first incorporate Houdini in its work creation pipeline. Or if we just add a minor role. But with Far Cry 5 we expanded
that pipeline quite a lot. The way we were using
Houdini on our production is that we had the pipeline that was both relying on the Houdini
and the Houdini engine. We used Houdini to produce all our tools which were generating fresh water, sands, power lines, the cliffs,
generating all the biomes. Also generating fog density
map and also the wall map. With Houdini engine integrated
inside our game editor, all the tools were made
available to the level artists. It was in constant evolution as it was being built up by the level artists. How do we manage our
content when there are so many iterations like this? We wanted our content
to always be coherent in the way that we wanted it from an art direction point of view. We wanted the whole
pipeline to be automated but actually a step further. We had Houdini Engine running
on a set of build machine. We were actually remaking
the old world every night. The purpose of that is
we wanted to make sure that all the users working on the project would come in in the
morning and have the full world fully rebaked with
fresh data all up to date. The way we were working,
all the procedural inputs that were fed to Houdini
and the Houdini engine for the users was all controlled within our game editor so we had a bunch of terrain data that the user
could paint on the terrain. So we had to set the splines and shapes and this was all sent to
Houdini via either Python script or the user would extract files on disc and Houdini would go and
read and load those files for each procedural tools that we had. By automating all this
with procedural tools, it really helped us relieve the workload of level artists so
they can actually focus on the more important
stuff and give their love and part of terrain where
it's really more interesting rather than wasting time doing tedious repetitive tasks all over
the large part of terrain. All our procedural recipe would make sure this part, like actually
90% of the world would always be following the
rules we wanted it to. Procedural solutions that
we implemented on Far Cry 5 really helped reduce the
workload of the level artists and given them more time to
focus on what really mattered. The procedural generation
ensures us that we have actual visual coherence and consistency throughout the world. Even though the terrain
was changing constantly, the rules that we wanted to
apply from an art direction point of view were always in place. (soothing music)
