Realistic Terrain Design

Tropical Terrain

This portfolio piece was created to further explore creating realistic terrain for next-gen game engines. Using the software Photoshop, Maya, Mudbox, World Machine, and the UDK game engine I was able to come up with these results. Once vegetation is applied it creates a very realistic and convincing 3D environment. World Builder is a very powerful tool to generate great texture maps to take your terrain to the next level of realism. Finally using the UDK game engine the pieces come together as the textures are combined with a shader to mix and randomize the textures to create a great non-repetitive landscape that perfectly matches your texture maps.

Using this technique you can create some very convincing and unique landscapes. To reduce file space when working with a real-time game engine such as UDK I use techniques where I place multiple textures inside the RGBA channels of a single texture. Using a little shader trickery you can then separate the textures channels and use each image in a separate material saving on memory and file size.