Creating Environment

Julien took care of this part as he is working at the office, hence is closer to Jeremy. He started off by planning out the size of the area itself, which is about 3 square kilometers, he then sculpted the main features of the terrain with Unity’s terrain tool.

Then, he defined the main roads, points of interests and finally planted the city right in the middle of the map.

Herelsor’s high tower will be seen from every point of the map and will serve as a landmark so the player never gets lost.

After having blocked out the first defining characteristics of each point of interest, Julien and Jeremy spent some time populating the areas with trees, houses and props.

The exterior of the city is very rural, and is mainly inhabited by farmers and poor citizens that cannot afford to live within the walls of Herelsor, we used wood and rocks are the main materials for this Area.

The city however benefits from trades with the neighboring towns and the capital and shows more luxurious materials and methods of constructions, such as paved flooring, plastered walls, rounded roofs and multiple stories buildings.

Material Creation

One of the key components of a production with such a small team is reusability. You have to be capable of making the most out of what you’ve got without losing too much time on each asset, otherwise you just blow your milestones!

This is why we decided to work with Substance Designer and Substance Painter. The Allegorithmic suite offers the best trade-off between quality and time as it allows you to quickly iterate and fix your materials as you work. It also allows your team to have a consistent style throughout the project. You don’t need to start all over again each time you get your base wrong and it looks good as long as you are careful.

My method of making Materials has changed a lot over the past months, I have gone from semi procedural generation with Zbrush and Substance Designer to fully procedural with Substance Designer as I have a better mastery of the software.

I will spend some going through the process of the Zbrush plus Substance workflow, which is a more interesting approach when it comes to showing screenshots of the workflow itself and will explain how I proceeded with a paved floor material.

(The workflow I have been using is highly inspired by Anthony Vitale’s video on youtube)