Terrain - Monika

[Monika]I wasn't quite sure what to do about the terrains. We talked that we could use the Unity terrains because they come with some perks, but I sort of didn't see the need for that. I thought it would be easier to just model them in Maya. Mainly because we had gaps and bottomless pits and most of the paths were climbing up the rocks which I thought would be harder to simulate in Unity.

After I modeled everything flat, I used the Maya sculpting tools to give it some more variety and simulate a natural environment. For the textures, I had several options. 1. I could have unwrapped everything, they're not that big pieces and painted them in Photoshop, save as some huge 4k res file and use that. Though of course that's incredibly inefficient even if it would have looked nice because I could paint even the smallest details with whatever brushes I want. 2.Just use small repeatable textures. But that's very limiting and boring and gives no variation. 3. I could have done option 2, but combined it with decals to make it more interesting. Or 4. use vertex painting. I went with 4.

For a long time I've been hearing about vertex painting, but I never really knew what exactly it was and what it was used for. But after I watched some tutorials it all finally made sense. But to apply it, I first needed to learn how to use ShadeFX, the new node based system for creating shaders within Maya. With that I managed to create a simple shader that blends 3 textures together based on the vertex colours. I learned how to tile textures within the shader and also how to add normal maps and control the specular.

The problem with using this shader though is that it can't be exported to Unity. So our alternative is to use Joe's version which has Shade Forge and try to replicate the exact same shader within Unity. We haven't gotten around that yet, but it will be done in the future and all our terrains and possibly other natural structures will be made this way. This will help us to create nice gradients from a sandy terrain to a more grassy and lively one, like the whole idea of it is. Decals will still be used, but those will have more to do with the general vegetation and cracks in the walls.