Environment
I made a shader to use on the terrain. I wanted a more natural blending that also takes in consideration the displacement map of the texture. The result can be seen below. Notice how the snow doesn’t cover some rocks and grass blades and the sharper and more textured material transitions.
I used 3 layers controlled by the red vertex color channel (0.0 for layer #1, 0.5 for layer #2, 1.0 for Layer #3), and snow with the Alpha channel.
Each layer uses a basecolor, packed Ao-Roughness-Height, and normal. I did not implement metalness because it’s not needed for terrain (I’ll use projected/mesh decals or another mesh if I need it)
I added slope and height and AO masking for a more natural snow look and added wetness and various roughness and color adjustments for each layer
The downside for this is that it doesn’t work with Unreal’s landscape system, but I prefer working with mesh terrains anyway since it’s more customizeable and the performance is better. There’s some manual work needed for optimization but I’ll get to it when I’m done.
I made sure the node tree is organized and readable, the “named reroute” node is the best.
I changed the terrain a little bit, added some mountains and flattened areas and things like that. I specifically wanted the water tower to be visibile from nearly everywhere because it’s the biggest and highest structure of villages and I like how imposing/important it is.
I took a screenshot of the terrain and planned out the location of some important areas. I blurred out spoilers and things that give out too much information, but this is roughly what I had in mind.
With that done, I took the terrain to Gaea and added some erosion and rocks to it then adjusted the buildings positions. While at it I imrpoved the road and fence generators to allow them to have steps. This is where I spent most of my time this week. Here is the result
The good news is that even though it’s not the most optimized it still runs at roughly 60 FPS on the Steam Deck. The thing that’s tanking performance right now is the volumetric clouds and the terrain that’s one single giant mesh with +500K triangles.
And finally I made another metallic structure for the portfolio environment project.
That’s all, thank you for reading, and I hope to see you again next time.