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If you’ve been following me this week you might be sick of hearing the T word from me. But the good news is that after this blog post I’ll be moving on to something else. So lets get to it!
Last week’s blog post covered my initial research and thoughts about the direction I wanted to take with my terrain.
My first attempt at terrain showed some promise but didn’t quite have the colourful and simplified look I wanted. My first port of call was to search around for a cell-shader that would work with the terrain. I’ve found some interesting avenues to explore for this angle but nothing I can implement quickly.
Instead I turned my focus to my palette. I simplified my textures by toning down high contrast areas and removing some detail. Then I saturated and modified the colours to make them brighter and it came out like this:
The brighter palette really clicked with me and seemed to be going down well with people who saw it. The next step was coming up with a technique that would give me the results I want as quickly as possible.
This one was done by building up the land to just short of where I wanted it and then stamping details on. It gives me a lot of control but relies on me adding organic randomness myself.
This one was done by building up areas above where I want it using a noise generator to get more randomness and then smoothing and eroding the landscape down to what I want before adding the details I want. This makes the randomness of the terrain more consistent but does make it a bit harder to get the big features I want in place.
Both methods seem useful and quick enough to use. I’m still learning but it’s useful to get a standard method to get the terrain started so I can create these levels quickly.
Finally I’ve been creating some custom meshes to add large details to the terrain. I’ve found the built in detail system does not handle large details well and the scale of my levels is so huge that the details do need to be kinda massive. Feeling confident they’ll look great after a bit more TLC.
Probably going to still be working on terrain for the rest of this week. I need to get the player’s ship to follow the no-longer-flat terrain better and make sure that I can get my enemies to make the journey from spawn point to attack zone. Then I’ve got to decide what will make more impact on my audience. A good looking ship moving across the landscape or some bombastic weapons being fired over the landscape :thinking: