Dynamic Arena

 Created by Nadja Linggi

For my bachlor project, I developed a fully procedural corruption system using Houdini and the Houdini Engine plugin for Unreal Engine 5, allowing flexible, art-directable corruption growth directly within the level.

The system uses a Houdini Digital Asset (HDA) with two inputs: a target mesh (left empty in Unreal for flexible selection) and a spline defining the corruption's path across the object. Along this path, branching structures automatically grow, adapting to the geometry beneath while maintaining a controlled silhouette.

To enable the corruption strands to wrap cleanly around geometry, meshes are automatically remeshed in the background to increase point density, while the visible meshes remain low-poly for performance. Key parameters exposed in Unreal include Radius, Branch Level, Threshold, Split Bias, Random Seed, Search Distance, and Alignment Ranges, allowing fine control over strand density, length, and directional flow to art-direct the corruption per asset.

An additional system adds blister-like bubbles procedurally along the corruption strands. Using grayscale noise, these bubbles cluster naturally, with controls for count, scale, and placement exclusion on downward-facing surfaces.

The corruption is animated using shader-driven growth and pulsation effects, enabling it to organically expand or shrink without the heavy computational cost of regenerating geometry in real time. A dedicated performance toggle system allows heavy operations to remain disabled during iteration and activated only during final passes.

This setup allowed me to generate large-scale, visually distinct corruption that could be precisely adapted to environmental geometry while retaining a strong alien visual identity and maintaining performance inside Unreal Engine.