My thesis artifact demonstrates the procedural hyper modular and destructed spaceship and interactive FX system which has over one hundred variants that could be customized in the Unreal engine at runtime. The artifact shows the destruction of module pieces and the inner structure. And there is a laser attack on the spaceship and the shield dissolved dynamically, and the impact with explosion effects process seamlessly in real-time.

I choose this mastery since I want to learn the workflow for cinematic effect systems and procedural content creation. In this project, I focused on designing the different modular parts of the spaceship with organic hard surface shapes and separating different connectors for different functional parts, like side connectors connecting to the wings, weapons, and engines. I’ve tested Houdini and Blueprint instance mesh methods and established the pipeline to align those meshes and randomly swap them out.

I’ve researched the alignment functions and RBD simulation in Houdini and rebuilt the workflow from Zbrush dynamic simulation for static destruction parts. I established the workflow to bake the explosion smoke textures from Houdini to Unreal To better show how dynamic materials and cinematic effects, I also researched how to customize the UI and blueprint to transit and update position and impacted normal attributes and keep them updated in Niagara systems.