From Tuesday April 22 to Friday April 25 2025 Breda University of Applied Sciences will host the Everything Procedural Conference for a variety of lectures, talks, demonstrations and masterclasses in the field of procedural content generation for games on our beautiful campus. The event offers many opportunities to meet and share knowledge with fellow developers.
The first Everything Procedural Conference took place in 2016. In the years since we have gained strong recognition as a leading conference in the field of procedural content for games.
While the generative power of LLMs is exciting, using them purely for direct content generation comes with challenges—plagiarism risks, unsafe outputs, and a tendency toward homogenization. At Embark, the ML and narrative teams have been experimenting with alternative applications, focusing on mixed-initiative workflows that enhance rather than replace human creativity. Though still in an exploratory phase, this work has provided valuable insights into the potential and limitations of LLM assisted writing. In this talk, Ashwathy will showcase prototypes of the tools they’ve been exploring, discuss the challenges encountered, and share how these experiments are shaping their understanding of writing with LLMs in games.
Embark Studios
At PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions, the long-term goal is to create interesting worlds where thousands of players can coexist and experience emergent gameplay. In their conference talk, Joey and Patrick will discuss how the studio combines machine learning (ML) and procedural techniques to generate terrain for their games. Their projects, Prologue and Preface, showcase how they use ML to generate worlds on large planetary scales (Preface) and interesting game levels on small scales (Prologue). These ML methods are seeded by and feed into more classical procedural techniques. By combining these two techniques, PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions are on their way to achieving their goal of creating interesting worlds which encourage emergent gameplay.
PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions
PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions
Creating a vast and dense virtual city is often considered the holy grail of procedural generation. While there are many ways to achieve this, the task would be impossible without constraints and limitations. In this talk, Larissa will discuss the process and design decisions that enabled the creation of a massive procedural city environment in Unreal Engine 5, where every building can be entered, using a custom procedural generation framework.
Independent Game Developer
Dungeon Alchemist is a fantasy mapmaking tool that employs procedural systems to allow its users to quickly generate beautiful, professional-quality battlemaps for their roleplaying games. In this talk, Karel, the lead programmer of Dungeon Alchemist, will go over the different procedural layers that make this happen. He will cover a wide range of topics, from terrain generation and room layout design to low-level mesh manipulation.
Lead Programmer - Briganti
On top of being used to generate offline, the PCG plugin in UE can also generate at runtime, with gameplay interaction. In this presentation, Adrien will revisit a classic game: Snake with a PCG twist. He will show us how to have gameplay elements impact the generation at runtime, but also how to profile the cost of PCG with some hints on how to adapt it to different platforms like Mobile. All while using the latest and greatest of PCG in UE 5.5.
Epic Games Montreal
Over the last couple of years, for Nikola, Nodevember has been the perfect launchpad for exploring procedural modeling and animation through quick (and occasionally more elaborate) experiments. Using Houdini as a primary tool, these explorations pushed the boundaries of creativity within the constraints of the event’s themes. This talk will delve into the technical challenges faced, the artistic decisions made, and the lessons learned along the way, offering insights into how constraints can fuel new perspectives.
Principal Technical Artist - Nordeus
Superworld demonstrates how LLMs transform natural language into procedural Houdini workflows, instantly generating terrains and cities from text prompts. Our pipeline automatically manages thousands of technical parameters, making sophisticated Houdini capabilities accessible to anyone regardless of technical expertise. This revolutionary approach represents the future of creative tool interaction, where AI comprehension meets procedural power to democratize content creation while preserving artistic control.
Supermodel
Niklas developed custom music software that enables music to react much more dynamically to game events than conventional tools allow. In this talk, he will walk you through several of the algorithms he uses and showcase how they sound in action.
Game Designer / Adaptive Music Specialist - Nifflas' Games
Mythica is a company focused on building foundational tools for procedural game development. Slater Victoroff will explain why open sourcing our tools is the best choice for both our company and the industry. We’ll explore the challenges and benefits of open source and why you should consider it too.
Mythica
Learn how Mainframe creates the massive world for their MMO using Houdini, Unreal Engine 5, and a small team. This talk covers everything from technical design philosophy and pipeline development to key details and lessons learned.
Lead Technical Artist / Co-founder - Mainframe
During this talk, Remco and Michael will share their experiences working on Prologue: Go Wayback! They will take us from the implementation of procedural techniques, the use of PCG inside of Unreal, and working with machine learning in their terrain pipeline with Houdini to the challenges and limitations they encountered in the process.
PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions
PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions
In this presentation, Len and Christian will cover how a small team at Heart Machine utilized Houdini and Unreal to build a procedural world for the open-world rogue-like game: Hyper Light Breaker, currently in Early Access on Steam. In order to make every run feel unique but intentional, a directed procedural world pipeline was built from scratch working closely with design and environment art departments. A custom data-driven sub-system in Unreal populated surface features like trees, grass, and architecture, while terrain variants were generated in Houdini.
Lead Technical Artist - Heart Machine
Senior Technical Artist
Dmytro Kucherenko will give an overview of the VDB compression technology called ZibraVDB for Houdini and Unreal Engine. He wil demonstrate how it not only reduces storage sizes but also how it enables realtime rendering of VDB sequences.
Zibra AI
Apex is still pretty scary and new for most existing Houdini artists, this talk by CGWiki Author Matt Estela will provide a jargon free explainer of the problems Apex is trying to solve, and a bridge from assumed Houdini knowledge into Apex.
CGWiki Author
Optimizing a game for multi-platform comes with various challenges. In this talk Simon Verstraete will cover how procedural pipelines where build for LEGO Horizon Adventures.
Studio Gobo
In this session, Paul and Joey from Applied Intuition will dive into two production workflows for generating procedural maps from multimodal sensor data, including lidar, camera imagery, and auxiliary metadata. The talk will cover a traditional pipeline centered around mesh and heightfield generation, as well as an alternative pipeline leveraging Gaussian Splatting for efficient scene reconstruction. The talk covering Houdini and Unreal Engine workflows will highlight key technical challenges, data conditioning steps, and tradeoffs in fidelity, performance, and scalability.
Bismuth Consultancy
Applied Intuition
The upcoming game Waterwolf recreates the rich history of the Dutch landscape through procedural generation. Born from the collaboration between architectural designer Jos Feenstra and geodetic engineer Martin Kodde, it tells the story of how the Netherlands was shaped by this perpetual dance with the sea. This presentation explores various procedural generation techniques inspired by Townscaper, delves into the benefits of implementing them in Rust, and shares the development journey behind the game.
Co-founder - Geofront.nl
This masterclass will be on-site and run over the course of two days (Tuesday and Wednesday) from 9:00 to 17:00. To participate you need to bring your own laptop or hardware. Tickets include drinks, lunch and a conference ticket.
Creating a Procedural Stylized World!
In this two-day beginner workshop, you will learn the fundamentals of tool-making with Houdini and Unreal Engine 5. Our focus is on creating stylized assets procedurally by leveraging tools that speed up asset creation. In Unreal, we develop various tools that help us build stunning scenes – including houses, foliage, and bridges. Additionally, all textures will be created using Houdini’s new COPs toolset.
Studio Gobo
Cloud Imperium Games
Electric Square
Frictional Games
This masterclass will be on-site and run over the course of two days (Tuesday and Wednesday) from 9:00 to 17:00. To participate you need to bring your own laptop or hardware. Tickets include drinks, lunch and a conference ticket.
In this two-day advanced workshop, we will use Project Elderwood and Natsura to demonstrate how Apex can be pushed far beyond rigging to create powerful simulations and flexible 3d modelling tools. We will also show how the addition of Copernicus to the Houdini toolset simplifies complex photogrammetry workflows that previously relied on multiple tools, enabling artists to waste less time on roundtrips, automate repetitive tasks, and get from raw-scan to in-engine results much faster.
Over the course of several hands-on workshops, we will build a working modelling tool that highlights when Apex based modelling tools make sense (and when they don’t). The Apex sessions will be broken up by short Sops and Copernicus based tutorials and examples of plant modelling and scan processing.
No previous Apex experience is required, but a strong foundation in procedural modelling and Houdini is recommended.
Natsura
Natsura
This two-day masterclass will feature a collection of advanced Houdini deep dives delivered by leading Houdini experts.
This masterclass will be on-site and run over the course of two days (Tuesday and Wednesday) from 9:00 to 17:00. To participate you need to bring your own laptop or hardware. Tickets include drinks, lunch and a conference ticket.
A walkthrough of Tops by CGWiki Author Matt Estela, from first principles through to complex production level workflows.
CGWiki Author
In this workshop Paul will walk you through building containerized setups suited for implementing Machine Learning workflows inside Houdini without breaking your PC! In this session you will learn the basics of Docker, and how it can be used in production. With that environment set up, Moritz will use the TRELLIS Image to 3D container to generate geometry which can be used and modified inside of Houdini.
Bismuth Consultancy
Entagma
In this workshop we wil build a biome generation pipeline using SideFX Labs newest Biome toolset. Participants will start by designing a biome ID map in Copernicus with a random tile pattern. This biome ID map will then procedurally drive terrain terraforming, plant scattering, and terrain texturing to produce a fun, shuffled-biome, board game environment.
SideFX
The focus of this masterclass will be to demonstrate several techniques for fracturing geometry within Houdini and Unreal and using those fractured assets inside Unreal for real-time destruction. The class with be divided into three different approaches for creating this destruction, using Houdini fractured assets with Niagara Systems and Point Caches, using Houdini fractured assets with Chaos simulations and finally fracturing and simulating with Chaos tools in Unreal while triggering Niagara Systems to spawn dust and debris.
NetherRealm Studios
This hands-on workshop guides participants through creating their first LLM-powered Houdini Digital Asset (HDA). We’ll start with the basics of setting up Ollama locally, then learn how to design and implement a practical tool that leverages large language models to enhance your Houdini workflow. Participants will learn how to efficiently pass parameters between Houdini and LLMs, avoid common pitfalls like context overload, and structure their tools for optimal results. The session culminates with an exciting demonstration of using vision models to analyze and refine Houdini-generated content, opening up new possibilities for iterative creation. Perfect for Houdini users looking to incorporate AI into their pipeline, no prior machine learning experience required.
Supermodel
In this session we will look at building environments with Houdini and Unreal Engine PCG.
SideFX
When needing to efficiently produce high-accuracy environments, the reliability and intuitiveness of your toolkit is paramount. User input must be minimised, and the automated processes must be airtight to ensure as little time is lost as possible. This workshop will walk you through a variety of functions that can be implemented into your HDAs to benefit your user experience and improve the stability of your output.
Q3D
A demonstration of how to create and composite foliage and props on a Massive Worlds scale using Houdini and PCG. The method allows teams to iterate and collaborate on procedurally dressed environments, using unified prop grids in Unreal, fully compatible with world partition workflows.
The participants will be shown how to use the upcoming Massive Worlds Toolkit v1.2 compositing pipeline. Allowing them to combine various sets of Houdini generated point clouds of foliage and rocks from different biomes with road propsing and RVT decals. Using a PCG driven Widget in Unreal, you will then learn how to instanciate or re-instanciate these objects into an open world environment, with the simple click of a button.
PCG spawning | Fracture Labs
PCG spawning | Fracture Labs
This masterclass will be on-site and run over the course of two days (Tuesday and Wednesday) from 9:00 to 17:00. To participate you need to bring your own laptop or hardware. Tickets include drinks, lunch and a conference ticket.
Everything will be achieved using Blender’s Geometry Nodes system. Previous experience with the system is not required.
Blender
Blender
Roxana will present her procedural embroidery tool: a Substance Painter filter that converts any texture or paint information into embroidery. The tool allows artists to create various embroidery techniques, including freestyle embroidery, cross-stitching and beadwork.
Breda University of Applied Sciences
This student showcase presents a semester project focused on creating a time-lapse of a dandelion’s growth. The presentation will cover the process, from geometry creation to animation and simulation, leveraging various contexts within Houdini to bring the plant to life.
Breda University of Applied Sciences
Jan will present a toolkit for managing Houdini tools in Unreal, enabling tool restoration after saving, simultaneous multi-tool management, and tool chaining for complex results. A user-friendly interface ensures artists can fully utilize its capabilities without requiring Houdini expertise, streamlining workflows and enhancing creative possibilities.
Breda University of Applied Sciences
In this talk, Valentina will showcase how she created a procedural rice fields tool built in Houdini and Unreal. She will explain how she leveraged terrain workflows as well as Unreal’s scriptable tools to create an easy-to-use tool for generating both rice terraces and flat rice fields.
Breda University of Applied Sciences
During this presentation, Seb will present his dynamic billboard system. Not only does this system offer procedural solutions for billboard mesh generation, but it also offers systems for dynamic billboard displays. Most notably, the text system, which generates dynamic text in runtime inside of shaders to add custom texts.
Breda University of Applied Sciences
Sahar will present her latest Houdini project: a tool to generate fully procedural creatures, from a cat to a cow and any combination of creatures with multiple limbs, neck, head and more, all with a high degree of parameter-based customization. The resulting creatures are rigged including some procedural animation. They will have anatomically correct muscles, generated procedurally with muscle and tissue simulation.
Breda University of Applied Sciences
Discount is provided for students, alumni and group tickets.
Please provide the correct promotion code at checkout.
EPC2025_BUASSTUDENT – For BUas students
EPC2025_ALUMNI – For BUas alumni
EPC2025_STUDENTS – For students