Painting

Almost all materials were done in Substance Painter using mostly only custom procedural materials. Some black & white masks in Substance Painter were eventually modified by hand and rare details painted by hand as well but it was mostly an automated workflow all the way. We were constantly trying new assets and experimenting with different material treatment for the assets and the whole map so I had to use a procedural workflow to be fast & efficient. Just fooling around with Dirt and Metal Edges generator along with filters can give you amazing results in Painter. The hard part, one I was not necessarily always great at, I must say, was to find the right balance between a simplified stylized material and a more realistic detailed one. I had to constantly balance a number of details put in the albedo, roughness and/or normal map to avoid having assets looking too busy and to let the stylized sculpts speak for themselves.

Surprisingly most materials in the scene are quite simple. Classic albedo/roughness/normals combo, and emissive maps for those glowing structures. Most of the details were pushed further by directional rimlights and static point lights to push albedo values and specular to the limit. Big thanks to team-mate and senior tech artist Ira Goeddel for sharing his lighting workflow with me. He gloriously revisited the lighting on Sinners Mire, the first map I did for Shardbound, and sharing some of his tips helped me a ton for HighLands!

The grass, however, is a bit more tricky but nothing too crazy. I found out that the key thing was to make grass blades not cast any shadow, that way they were more subtle. Another important thing is to use custom normals on grass blades to match the ground normals. Last key thing is to use world projected textures on both the terrain and grass blades so it’s then easy to make them both share the exact same albedo/roughness value where they clip. If you do all that, you should have a seamless and super smooth transition between the ground and the grass blades. Then you can add a gradient on grass blades from root to tips to push the albedo value at their tips and voilà, stylized grass blades!

The grass on tiles is a bit more tricky, due to that one material constraint I was talking about above, but in essence, it’s the same process. Here’s a very very rough breakdown of how the material is working