Stairs Material & Procedural Height Remesh

Mainly inspired by :
- JH (Rayid) (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Z533k0)
and
- Elijah Vasilenkof (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3okkBE)

I wanted to try this way to create a material and training myself blending some grass, peebles and leaves over the stairs (even a snake ^^).
Pretty happy with the result in Marmoset Toolbag, then why not trying to make it game ready by what ever remesh process?

For a long time i wanted to experiment a procedural way to make it in Houdini. Why Houdini ? Simply because .hda files from Houdini can contain paramaters linked to the mesh and those can be modified in another software that got Houdini's plugin.
This process able me now to reduce polygons from a Height map mesh that contain millions of polygons and still keeping the tiling, UV's and create easily and quite fast LOD's right into Unreal Engine 4 ...

Cave mood
(All last four images rendered in Marmoset Toolbag)

Material Substance Designer Graph

Houdini Procedural Height Remesh Process :
1) Import Height map in the HeightfieldFile node. 2) Result from the HeightFieldFile node. 3) Result from the final process. 4) Create a Digital Asset (.hda). 5) Create and link parameters to the Digital Asset

Here is the .hda imported in Unreal Engine 4. Let's play around parameters to create all meshes desired as Static Meshes (you can even export them as .fbx)

LOD's from 16148 tris to 778 tris. (Maybe a bit to high ^^ )

First result with the material in additionnal

Why not some Vertex painting to clean up a bit the center

Final result with a (really) quick composition of the Environment Set Pack in Unreal Market Place