In the New England colonies, the landscape was characterized by rolling hills, rocky outcroppings, and dense forests of deciduous trees such as oak, maple, and birch. The grass was typically a mix of native species such as bluegrass and fescue.
How to make such diversity in the strategy game with limited resources?
You can use up to 4 different masks in one texture since you have RGB and alpha channels. You must prepare it well and consider what you want to paint or render there. For example, for the Red channel, we render the height of the terrain from -5m to +30m. For Green, we bake the scene's ambient lighting into the mask. Blue channel had a special mask that described the steep terrain.
Then you still have space for the last mask in the Alpha channel. Here we put all the beaches. We took a certain height from -5 to 0 and said, " Okay, these will be beaches." Then you take this data and paint on them manually, adding or removing the areas where you want to have them.
Again, we mainly used Houdini for the possibility of reuse and consistency of the output for all the terrains we will have in the game.
We also generate small flowers and grass for each terrain. These flowers and grass are cards with a texture of different species of flowers and are scattered on the surface by height or by random noise.
As we described in the last blog and this blog, preparing one output takes a long time. But when you prepare it for one terrain, you can quickly implement new maps into the game.
Next time we will discuss the level design, planting trees, bushes, rocks, etc.