Procedural Worlds : A proposition for a tool to assist in creation of landscapes byprocedural means in Unreal Engine 5

Abstract: This thesis explores the possibilities of creating landscapes through procedural means within the game engine Unreal Engine 5. The aim is to provide a flexible procedural landscape tool that doesn't limit the user and that is compatible with existing systems in the engine. The research questions focuses on comparison to other work regarding landscape generation and generation of procedural roads. The process to achieve this was done through extensive implementation adding modules that both builds upon and adds to the source code. The implementation was divided into five major components, which was noise generation for terrain, biotope interpolation, asset distribution, road generation and a user interface. Perlin noise, utilizing Fractal Brownian Motion were a vital part of generating terrain with varying features. For interpolation a modified version of Lowpass Gaussian filtering was implemented in order to blend biotope edges together. Asset distribution and road generation were implemented in a way that uses pseudo-randomness combined with heuristics. The user interface was done to tie everything together for testing. The results shows potential for assisting in procedural landscape creation with a large amount of freedom in customization. There is however flaws in some aspects, namely the interpolation methods suffer from clear visual artefacts. Whether it is suitable for professional standards remains to be fully proven objectively as the testing in this thesis work was limited.