Case study 06 / PCG shader prototype

Voronoi world generation prototype.

A research prototype for dividing a procedural world into controllable regions using a Voronoi pattern generated in an Unreal Engine material, written to a render target, then sampled by PCG for region-based spawning.

Demo videoVoronoi cells driving masks, regions, and spawn logic.

Voronoi world generator material and region preview 1 — Capture 01material graph view

Voronoi world generator material and region preview 2 — Capture 02Region values prepared for PCG density filtering.

Voronoi world generator material and region preview 3 — Capture 03Cell grouping experiments for world masks and biome logic.

Voronoi world generator material and region preview 4 — Capture 04Blueprint and PCG workflow for sampling generated texture data.

Voronoi world generator overview capture — Capture 05Prototype overview showing the region mask approach in Unreal.

Voronoi region mask carouselOpen video

Summary

This case study demonstrates a procedural world-generation approach based on Voronoi structures. The available prototype video and images suggest generated region layouts, cell-based terrain or biome boundaries, and world-building experiments for Unreal Engine.

Focus Areas

Procedural world generation
Voronoi-based layout generation
Region, biome, or terrain partitioning
Prototype visualization and iteration

System Breakdown

Procedurally generating a map/world is a pretty cool idea but can easily become a rabbit hole if you want to get great visuals out of it since there are so many variables and factors that need your attention !

I was researching procedurall world generation last year and made a prototype based on voronoi pattern. It was useful as a semi-simple way to divide a world into controllable regions.

The Approach

Generate a Voronoi pattern in an Unreal Engine Material Graph Custom node
Give each cell a random grayscale value range, such as 0.0-0.1, 0.1-0.2, etc.
Draw the material to a 256x256 Render Target in Blueprints
Sample the texture data inside PCG
Use density filters to extract regions
Spawn static meshes per region

Features

many features can be applied to this voronoi approach :

Texture the regions differently ( grass fields, plowed fields , sand, etc )
Create masks by merging couple of cells from random or specific location in the UV ( I did create a city mask for example from center of the UV which can be seen in the video )
Group cells (make a centralized region) into biomes ! which can represent mountain, waterbody, city, desert, etc by specific textures and spawnable objects
Generate same voronoi pattern in PCG HLSL node and get rid of render target writting/sampling

References

References that inspired the idea:

Result

In the end we went with another approach but this shader was pretty cool !