Procedural Worldbuilding — Reel FX / Netflix
Procedural Worldbuilding — Reel FX / Netflix
Super Giant Robot Brothers is a Netflix animated series from Reel FX (2022, directed by Mark Andrews) — the first series created entirely inside Unreal Engine, rendered in real time rather than on a render farm.
My work was the procedural city: a Houdini HDA system that generates Titanopolis, the show's home city, as a kit of district generators — downtown, residential, industrial, retail, and resort blocks growing from terrain — streamed directly into Unreal Engine as live Houdini Engine assets. Artists could reshape whole districts in the level without leaving the editor.
Titanopolis starts as procedural district generators in Houdini — terrain, road networks, and building blocks that grow downtown towers, suburbs, and industrial zones from the same rule set.
One system, versioned as HDAs, so the whole city stays regenerable at any point in production.
"On a real-time show, the environment pipeline is the render pipeline."
The generators stream into Unreal as live Houdini Engine assets — downtown, residential, industrial, and resort districts sitting in the level as editable actors on the Titanopolis terrain.
Because the show renders in-engine, this is the finished world: art-directable to the end, no bake-out between design and final frame.
