Landscape work

I’ve started to work on the landscape for my Japanese House project. The idea is to have a big tiled landscape for the view, and a few small landscapes to an higher resolution where the gameplay will take place.
So I started doing 2 things: 1.) I wrote from scratch the landscape material and replaced  the material used in the previous screenshots on this blog, 2) I generated the big landscape itself.
Let’s start from the latter point. I’ve generated the landscape in World-machine using the  actual hgt data of the Fuji-san region, improving them with some erosion and finally re-combining the original hgt data back reconstruct the typical Fuji shape, lost after the necessary erosion to give details to the world.

Here you can see my world machine graph and its result inside world machine.

I also did a small video recorded in Unreal Engine, while testing the material. In this video it’s just the eroded version of the landscape, without the recombining with the original hgt data, so you can see why this last step is so important. You can, of course, also see what the material looks like, even though I did  some more tuning after work and added a few more features.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTpA5iHTuvQ]

For the landscape material, as I’ve mentioned before, I wrote a specific material for this project, instead of using the material coming from some pack available on the Unreal Marketplace. I’ve created the material in Unreal Engine inspired by the material used by Epic for the “A boy and his kite” demo. I’ve re-used some of the textures, some of the layers and some foliage (this one adapted to my needs) of that material and then added my own layers, specifics to this project (2 different layer for the volcano, one for the gravel of Japanese gardens, one for the moss of the gardens and one for the roads). All the new needed textures were generated in Substance Painter. Here some very preliminary results of all this work; enjoy!