Hitchhikers Guide to Eden - Part 2: Island hopping

Hi again and welcome back to another issue of Hitchhikers Guide to Eden !
I would like to show you a texturing and painting workflow I have recently done. I usually go through these steps with every area after I have finished shaping the basics of the landscape. I´ve choosen a (really) small remote island out of the endless ocean for my test object.

Texturing
Please note, that I use a very bright light settings to get a high contrast, tropical sunshine. Therefore I have to paint the whole area with a mid grey tone, to actually see the textures instead of a glearing white.

• So, this is the basic position. A small risen dot in an empty area full of water. I choose my basic sand texture for the base layer and fill the whole area. So, nothing special here...
  

• After that I start painting my base grass textures with 100%pressure. I always try to paint kind of clustered and connected shapes when it comes to grass textures. I will add palms and grass there next. And plants usually grow in "chaotic systems".But this is more crucial when it comes to larger terrains. For now, I just wobble the mouse to get some shape like this :)
  

• Next, I add the second sand layer. This textures main function is to blend the grass with the base sand. I sourround the grass shape I have painted before. I don´t care for details at this point and paint it also with 100% pressure.
  While doing this, I try to feather the borders of the grass shape to make it look more natural (chaotic) grown.
  
  
  
  
  
• Now I´m coming back to my base sand texture. With it, I feather the second sand layer, like I did before.
  I usually use a 50% brush when this is done to blend the textures a little bit more on some edges. One must be careful with that, because you get a blurry look very fast when you overleap textures. I try to focus only on the edges of texture shapes. And to summarize this: I always texture from the top to bottom layer.
  
  
  
• Now I add some curly palms on the grass layer. I try to use not too many tree variations. Instead I differ the scaling a lot and how deep the trees trunks stuck in the ground to get some different heights. As for the grass textures, I usally try to form palm clusters with some space between them (well, this is a very small island, so it´s not that important here).
  Scaling is one of the most crucial points (next to light) when it comes to level design in my opinion. So I add a NPC to see how heigh the trees actually are. And trees are quit big commonly (unless you are designing a tree nursery!).
  
  
• Adding the detail grass layer is next. Nothing special here I guess, because of the little space of this island. Like the textures, I always paint the big plants first and then move on to the smaller grasses. Doing this right it gives the plants a natural grown look (one can also hide those ugly edges on the gound where the grass is placed).
  
  
  
  
  So here we go.. Quit green I think...
  
  
  
  I´m quit pleased with these results of this fifteen minute work. But not happy :) ...Because this is only half the work.
  
  

Tainting
I have found out, using the color toos is very powerfull, when used focused. It is perfect to simulate light and shadows (especially in full and bright daylight), give whole areas a rich color variation and to blend textures much more naturally. You can just paint moss on stones, make small ponds deep and muddy or even simulate a giant shadow of a mountain that darkens the valley beaneth it. For this island, I wanted to try something new and paint a tropic ocean.

• Let´s start with the shoreline. This is a shot of the unpainted area. No, this is not true. Like I have mentioned earlier, I have of a mid grey tone painted overall the area. So I have darkened my textures this way. This is to be a huge advantage now.
  
  
  
  
  

• The thing I do, is to paint the sand wet with a slightly darker grey tone (since I like my natural sandcolor). I try to imagine the waves, flushing on the sandy shore and paint these small areas even a little bit darker.
  Now I want to make the sand much brighter, hit by direct sunlight with no clouds before it. So I paint on it with a lighter color. This way, it is even possible to simulate cloud shadows or snowy mountains, just hit by the sunlight on their tops (like this).
  I also tone the grass texture a little bit darker and with more saturation.
  Now comes the fun part. Defining the actual water color for the shoreline. I want an emerald tone for it, so I surf google image search for references (I just love it!). I should mention, that I have the water shown and the fog turned on most of the times, because I want to see the final results and match the right colors. So, I paint one water color and try to match the one from a reference photos from google I like. The colour I have choosen will be the basetone of the following.
  
  
• Next is the ocean. The first thing I do is to raise the terrain just below the sea level. This is much easier painting in the first place and it fits perfect for this small island with shallow waters. Another point here is, it is easy to nearly even the ground and the water level at the horizons. This is a good way to fake an "endless ocean".
  I choose myself four main colors of the previously selected color and paint them gradient away from the island. This way you can give the ocean different heights. I use the lightes tone to simulate heigher grounds like sand banks and darker colors for lower grounds or an abyss for example. This can take a lot of time testing, but the good thing about tainting is, that you can easily replace the colors for larger areas. Okay so far, but I have decided to use these colors for another area and go on to make it a little more rockily and paint kind of a riff instead of sand.
  
  
• Surfing google again, I have found some perfect pictures of tropical reefs (like here and especially here). While looking at (a lot) of them, I try to figure out the main shapes and colors of it and adopt them into the toolset. In this case, I have painted some sandbanks and "dotted" darker colors of the same tone around them. And again, I paint from top to bottom and tryied to get some clustered reefs. This is a lot of chaotic painting, but also a great fun ! It is not easy to explain in the end, but this picture shows more than words I guess !
  
  
• The last thing I do, is paint the acutal reef. They are mostly clustered in round shapes with sand in it. Like chains, I have connected these single features with smaller reefs. I use a dark stone texture for this I also plan to use on cliffs later in that area. I have splitted the screenshot to point that out a little bit better.
  You don´t have to be accurate in this whole process. This is just about messing around with... water colors :)
  
  
  
  Well, thats´s pretty much it. So, turn the light on in your areas and start to paint and taint the hell out of them !
  
  Looks like there is some more work for me to do. This was just that small island on the right over there... Man, I need holidays !
  
  

Hitchhikers Guide to Eden - Part 1: Preparation

As announced yesterday, here is the first part of a making of / progress documentation I want to post. It should show you my default workflow when I´m starting a blank area and focuses on custom textures and basic painting techniques. I won´t go into light settings for this time, since this is a chapter for itself but also a point I put a lot of work time in. So here I go...

I always start with puzzeling a heightmap in photoshop. The one I used for the island is a combination of a generic terragen terrain and a DEM image I´ve found on the internet. I have painted them together in photoshop.

Parallel to this I usually use 3DMax to make a testrender of the actual heightmap to get a better feel for the different elevations. I don´t make the heightmap very detailed at that point. Mostly I just figure out where the main feature spots should be located and if the area fits the overall topographical look I´m aming for. In this case, I was after a large tropical island, like a typical seychelles landscape. So I have surfed the net for inspirational pictures like these.

Pleased with the results I then start importing the heightmap into the toolset. Thanks to YATT, this is a piece of pie. I usually do a lot of reshaping after that for many hours to get the main pathes digged into the terrain.

Often I walk around the areas in search for good vista points. From there I start planning the features of these nice views I have found. My philosophy in all areas is to have at least one scenic view when turning around 360 degrees from every point on the map. In this picture you can probably see that I have made many changes, including adding a jungle river and a (walkable) vulcano / mountain region in the north.


I have customized every texture of this area and also a lot of grass I´m planning to use. It was very hard to get the colors right, because of my bright lightsettings. I wanted to achive a colorful look with a lot of contrast like I had seen on all the different pictures of a tropical paradise. Before, I had to decide if I want to make a carribean isle or a seychelle like landscape. They differ a lot in color and foilage. I decided to go for the more tropical setting in this area. So I started painting the custom content.
I usually use two matching textures for sand / pathes, grass and stone. On the left you can see the results I came up with.

After that I have tested a lot with custom grass. At first I had to change the textures of the palm, because they were quit yellow when the sun shines on them during the daytime. But I wanted to gloom them in a rich green instead. After I had finally found the right colors and contrast, I started with the grasses. The crucial thing here is to match the different grass colors with the palm trees. After two days testing I came up with 4 different tropical grasses, two palm like plants and five tropical bushes.

A main problem with this area when it comes to texturing was, to decide which base texture to use. Is this island a rock covered by grass ? Or is it a mainly full of tropical grass with the mountains breaking trough the surface ? It took the rocky option one in the end. One main reason for that was, that I had found a trick to fake a lot of distant foilage details without forcing myself to paint the whole island green. I wanted to use grass decals for that.

To get this done, I have fired up SpeedTree. I took some snapshots of trees from four different angels to use them as the four different grass blades withing every grass texture. This grasses should fake the dense tree populations usually found on tropical islands (like here). This would give the whole area a lot more scale when viewing from a distant (wich will happen a lot, since I have found some great vistapoints). This test pictures should show you what I was up to:I think you get the point with these pictures. The great thing is, that this feature does not cost a lot of performance. So I had everything ready to start some serious works. All locations were shaped, the pathes digged and all textures and grass were painted. But where should I start to build ? Where will the player probably start ? Where will he start his journey and what is the first thing he will see and when he turns around a specific corner ? I´m always asking myself these questions during building areas.

I will post my answers to these questions in the next issue of the Hitchikers guide to Eden - Part 2.