Making the background landscape

Today, we’re moving on to the terrain modification. This is a rather difficult phase, cause it will not only determine the visual look, but it will affect somewhat the gameplay too.

Click read more to... you know the drill.

Now that we have the lake, rocks, boulders, moss, which gives a lot of detail, but we’re still missing the depth. Also, we haven’t got a real background yet, which is very disappointing. In this episode we’re about to change that. Well, if I want to be more precise, we’re looking at the background terrain to be more exact.

As you can see, there is nothing beyond our boulders, just that plane, flat emptiness. It’s finally time to make it use and be the basis of our background.

For a little update, I added some moss on top of the boulders. Yeah, I know it doesn’t look all that good, but it’s necessary, and I didn’t have any options other than that. I can’t paint the terrain grass on objects, just the landscape. Besides the vegetation will obscure it, so it won’t be a problem later.

First, I wanted to make it flat and even on every side, because it’s much easier to adjust the landscape to the boulders in that way.

Another change I made, was to replace the terrain texture. The tiling was really started to drive me crazy, so it had to go. I didn’t find a solution to make it look good from distance, but at least I tried (I failed... and failed miserably). But, there is nothing to be worry about, cause I found a better one. This new grass material is very promising. It’s also from the same pack I used, but this is a newer and advanced version of that. It has a lot more options and adjustments, so it's better that way. The tiling is still there a little bit, but that’s bearable. I think I don’t have to mention that this will be much better later, but I really needed a better texture for the landscape.

Also I changed the lighting a bit. I added some warmth, because the cold and lifeless colors just didn’t cope with me anymore.

Yes, it doesn’t look as realistic than before, but this is also just a temporary thing, I see better everything with this coloration.

But, let’s get back to the background landscape. After I flatten out the landscape and made it unified, I started with the area I had the most information.

As you can see, it was the two “opposing” corners. Slowly, I progressed side to side, until they met at the center.

It was a good opportunity to mess around with the landscape tool and master it’s capabilities.

When, I was fairly done, I moved on to the entrance and the cliff sides.

After that, I got carried away a little, and came up with this.

It looks great doesn’t it? Well, to tell you the truth, it does look great, but it's perfectly inaccurate… There wasn’t really much information about the background terrain, so I used my imagination and made this awesome mountain like landscape with some very basic tools, and to my shock when I looked up my reference images, I found out something.

Yes. Those little lights that shines through the trees was the evidence, that I was wrong, and it was an useless effort.

The terrain in the background is actually rather flat. A little bumpy, but overall pretty flat. There is no ridge or huge mountain there. So, when I thought I finished, I had to start all over again. It was a painful experience to erase almost all of it, but it needed to be done. We’re going to accuracy remember?

I leave some pictures about the mountain, so the time and effort wouldn’t go to waste after all. Also the experience which I gained from forming this cliff, will get handy when I’ll make the cove’s inner part.

Note to self: Man… I really have to stop listening to my intuition here. There is every information I need on the reference images, so I don’t need to be creative. If only I could be this good when I do my other projects which NEEDS creativity, but nope, that’s not happening.

So after I lowered down most of the terrain, I really went in and studied every pixel on the reference images, and tried to figure out how the terrain would look without all the trees.

After a while, when I didn’t found any flaws, I smoothed out the landscape. This is important, not because it looks prettier, (it won’t be visible because almost nothing will be seen after it's populated with vegetation) but because the trees might grow from a very unrealistic angle from the ground, because there are some rough edges. So to prevent that I smoothed everything out.

The new background is much less interesting and spectacular, but it’s accurate. And that is the important thing here.

And, that’s pretty much it. I know it’s not a huge deal, and it won’t be that visible, but it’s an important feature nonetheless. Also it’s good to see that there are no taboo areas now, every part of the map has sense and purpose. The next part, I’m going to make the cove's inner part. That will be tough, cause while here it’s not that crucial if I mess up 1-2 meters here or there, but in the cove, it’s not acceptable. So, that will be quite a ride. I starting to catch myself, because I just started doing the inner part very recently while I writing this post, so you see a quite fresh progression here. I spent a few hours on that and I can say this will be harder than I though. Really changes the whole scene, and it will surely affect the gameplay.

I try to post it on the next week, because after that, we’re going to the most spectacular phase, vegetation. (Oh, yeah!)

All right, thanks for reading as always, and see you on the next one!