Moving forward with developing Wasteland Arenas for Herogrinder, our next challenge was to make terrain level deformations, like trenches and gaps, using an approach that is compatible with our current Ground workflow.
Here is how a trench will look on the map:
For this, we made the trench geometry separately and treated it as a placeable asset.
Please note that this trench mesh is just a concept and only for testing purposes.
To be able to place it on the map, we have to tell our shader where the trench will be, so we mask out the terrain with a trench mesh shaped mask (the mask is rendered automatically).
For the trench texture, at first we actually used the same shader as for terrain, leaving no visible seams between the ground mesh and the trench mesh.
The next step in this process is to properly design and model the trench meshes, completed with rocks, garbage, and radioactive waste.