Environment Art – Degrees

By Austin Chalk

On the past couple Twitch streams, we've gotten to show off a couple of our new city maps: Creep Rock City and Degrees! As an environment artist on Servo, I get to take both my own and the rest of our amazing art teams' assets and arrange them all into a final product. In this blog post I'll be showing you how I took our latest map, Degrees, from start to finish!

With any given map, design first decides on the gameplay hook and layout, including where the player is and isn't allowed to move. A layout that gets handed off to me usually looks something like this:

 
As breathtaking as it may already be, it's time for me to go to work.

The first thing I do when I open this layout is export a heightmap from the terrain. Because design has used raised/lowered areas to designate the play space and obstructions, I can use that height information when I take our map into the next stage: World Machine.

 
World Machine is a super useful program that shapes our terrain for different types of environments. By connecting our heightmap to a few nodes like Erosion, we're able to have realistically-generated formations for our scene. Now let's take this back into Unity!

In this step you can see that I've applied the new heightmap that World Machine has given us and it's already making a huge difference!

 
This is a personal preference, but it's usually around this stage (earlier if I can't wait) that I do a quick lighting pass on the scene. Not only do I want to see how our heightmap details are going to read in the final result, but I love defining and working in the scenes mood as soon as possible. Lighting is one of the quickest and most effective ways of establishing that. In the case of Degrees, I wanted everything to explicitly revolve around hot and cold.

Once the height map and some quick lighting is applied, the next thing I do is begin laying down roads. For a city scene, this really helps to organize the space and inform where I paint certain textures. Along with Unity's default painting tools, we use a handy plugin called Relief Terrain (RTP). It helps to quickly get a texture base to start with, and it even does some cool effects like global perlin normals and parallaxing. Here's a shot of what we have so far!

After we've got the base textures and roads, we can start placing all kinds of assets like skyscrapers, signs, trees, and rubble....so much rubble.

And here's our finished map! Hope you guys enjoyed seeing my process for this. Keep an eye out for new maps in the future!