A Sheep is enjoying the taste of a flower

Generating a huge environment is not an easy task, especially if you work alone, you can easily get lost in the process and be overwhelmed by the amount of work to accomplish to finish the scene with a good overall quality.

The rule I tried to stick to was to focus mainly on the big picture and the feeling of an immense landscape to explore; fewer details, less close-up, but mainly the wide angle and green as far as the eye can see.

As I focused on the big picture, I decided to get rid of some of my initial ideas: goodbye the abandoned tractor and its muddy track, goodbye the spiderweb and the butterflies trapped inside, goodbye the animated sheep jumping off the rocks fences…). Those were cool ideas but were completely out of the initial goal.

Stacking up the work, and biting more than you can chew is the perfect way to lose yourself in the process, be demotivated by the amount of workload and eventually never finish the project.

Of course, I can regret the lack of small details and interesting areas, but it was absolutely not the main goal I had for this project.

If I had to go more into details I would create a simpler scene with clearly established camera angles and points of interest, so I could focus more on all the individual elements that compose the shots.

Painting

The first iteration of the terrain textures was done using a complex set of splat maps and noise textures to blend between all my different materials (which were around 8 at that time). But when I switched to the UE4 landscape tool, I decided to take advantage of the amazing layer blending system and repaint absolutely all the terrain by hand using my (now)16 different materials layers.

The task was long and fastidious as opposed to the splat map techniques, But I felt like I had a bit more editing capabilities and personal control over the final result, that I couldn’t get using the splat map. In the end, I would suggest using a combination of both techniques, as it would be more time efficient and more interesting to use generated map (like erosion or slope map) which are harder to replicate by hand painting (even with custom alphas brushes ). And then paint some parts by hand like the paths or story related elements.