Terrain Creation in World Machine

Having a strong base shape to build the environment upon was an extremely important element for the creation of the environment. I spent 2 hours creating a heightmap and splatmap with the node-based workflow of World Machine.

I chose a V-formed valley shape since it helps frame the environment. This was especially important since i did not use trees or any other natural vertical props that otherwise frame typical environments. I started by creating a basic valley shape, added terracing and afterwards erosion in order to establish the shape of the terrain – the heightmap. Afterwards I used several height- and slope-based masks and selectors in combination with a red-green-blue gradient to create a splatmap. This map indicates where my terrain materials should be applied.

Those maps were imported into Unity, and implemented into a custom terrain shader which with some setup and variable tweaking handled the rest – applying materials according to the splatmap, Tessellation, LOD, terrain holes and some other minor features.

The materials were acquired from Megascans and had to be slightly tweaked. I inserted the gloss textures into the alpha channel of the metallic textures since the shaders required it and altered the albedos slightly in order to better fit with the colors of the props which i use.