I had the privilege of working with the talented folk at Studio Gobo and Guerilla Games on the recently released Lego Horizon game. Working on procedural world building solutions in both Houdini and natively within Unreal and prototyping high level concepts for how a game of this nature could be realised. I also worked closely with the animation and core pipeline teams to determine how the complex character and creature assets would be constructed in a Lego-esque way, delivering a facial animation solution that would allow the animators to work in Maya and replicate their work in engine with a complex shader setup.
We worked closely with a team of Lego Master Builders, who informed the general structure and design of complex Lego builds. This allowed us to closely replicate approaches and methods they would use in a physical build. One output of this process was a tile based terrain that I prototyped a solution for generating in Houdini. It used a configuration of modules that could be used in a Wang Tiles algorithm to place tiles and create areas of elevation and paths that could later be manually built upon.
An alternative solution we explored early on, was to build a terrain stamping tool directly within Unreal. This is the first prototype I built for that entirely in Blueprints as a proof of concept, which proved to be very much the direction we wanted to take. This would eventually be replaced with a more robust solution developed by the code team.
All minifig characters, including Aloy shown here, had a complex facial shader setup in Maya that the animators could control directly in Maya. All channels were keyed directly on the root bone of the deformation skeleton, so could be retrieved as custom animation curves in Unreal and used to drive shader parameters on the face material.
As a convenience, the face shader also had an auto-blink function that would remain active when the eyes were not directly animated.