Landscape Generation and Construction

Once I was happy with where everything was I started substituting the rough large scale cliffs with more carefully placed and smaller ones. I then dressed the cliffy parts of the terrain with my rock meshes and since this level doesn’t have any open field like ground areas I decided not to keep terrain patches on the ground but also place cliff meshes there. This made more sense since I knew I would be using a world aligned ground material blend for the cliffs that would always show on top.

As far as the cliff/rock meshes are concerned I figured out that my initial ones didn’t look like one big cliff when put next to each other and I attributed that to the fact that they were quite curvy, so I remade those and I made sure they are angular enough and have adequate flat, yet erosion curved areas to fit well together almost as pieces of a puzzle even when they are rotated around or upside down.

These meshes were sculpted in Zbrush, decimated to get the game version and then baked and painted in Substance Painter. In Painter I used a couple of rock micro surface materials that I made in Substance Designer as a base. I turned that into a smart material to keep visual consistency throughout the cliff variations. I avoided using elements like lichen for the large variations and kept that only for the smaller rocks so I could scale them without having elements on them that would give away their differences in size when used in game.