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Far Cry 5: a world built by rules in Houdini
Know first: What real land looks like, Scattering by rules
This breakdown takes apart how Ubisoft Montreal filled the world of Far Cry 5 (2018), a fictional county in Montana, with cliffs, rivers, fences, power lines and forests. The team built a set of procedural tools in Houdini that rebuilt this content from the terrain every night, while artists kept reshaping the land and steering the result. The main source is the slides of a GDC 2018 talk by Étienne Carrier, a technical artist on the game, with his notes on each slide. Two more help: his post on the PlayStation Blog and detailed notes of the recorded talk by Christian Mills. What makes it a good example: the talk shows the whole pipeline, two tools in depth, and the plans the team had to change.
The whole picture
The tools run one after another, and each leaves masks for the next: gray maps that mark where something is. The water tool leaves a water mask, the road tool a road mask and the cliff tool a cliff mask. The biome tool, which places plants by the rules of each kind of land, reads them all. Running the tools and saving their results is called baking.
terrain (a heightmap) + artist inputs (curves, painted biomes)
→ freshwater → roads → fences and power lines → cliffs → biomes → fog → world map
// each tool writes masks the next tools read
// fog: a map of fog density; world map: the small map of the world the player opens
→ point clouds of objects, terrain textures, height layers, 2D maps, meshes
rebuilt every night on build machines, piece by piece
| Part | The problem | The answer |
|---|---|---|
| Goals | The terrain kept changing for 2.5 years, and hand-placed forests went wrong | Content rebuilt from the terrain by rules, automatic, deterministic |
| The pipeline | Many tools, many artists, one huge world | Houdini tools inside the editor, run on small squares of land and every night |
| Cliffs | Big cliffs everywhere, and no way to cover them by hand | Cliff meshes generated from the slope, with rock layers and erosion |
| Biomes | Plants must grow where they would grow in nature | Each species scores every spot of land, and the strongest wins |