Star Citizen Live: Making Mountains

Patrick Gladys · Environment Artist

Painting a planet meant something else a year ago than what it does by now. As you know, we are constantly pushing the planet tech forward and all the features that are coming with it. Painting a planet means to first actually do an artistic paint pass, which means applying color to the planet. And then what it means as well is applying all the other pieces of content that are necessary to complete a planet as well through painting. And as I said, when we had the Star Citizen Live stream last time where painting was covered, all of these individual pieces of content, like the color, the objects and the ground materials, all of them were painted individually in individual passes. But since then, a lot of stuff has changed, and we will see some of the painting in this livestream as well, but I will not go into super much detail. But I will definitely show it off a little bit. What we will mostly focus on will be the height map creation, though.

Patrick Gladys · Environment Artist

The biggest improvement probably would be a much simpler and more compact design of those painting tools, which means that whenever we do these painting passes, and I told you that all individual pieces of content have to be applied separately, with that simpler design, we basically pack everything into one single brush. So it's basically a reduction, like four or five times quicker. When we had to do five separate painting passes before, it's all reduced into one now. The cool thing is all the color information and everything is saved dynamically in these brushes now. Whenever we want to change the color or change the objects or the ground materials, we can do so after all the painting is done and we won't have to repaint anything. It's not just a more compact and more simplistic design of the brushes that we use and the painting tools, but it's also much more dynamic. So we won't have to do tedious reworks and repaints of something whenever we want something changed. We can simply pick another color and it'll automatically update all over the planet. And this will save us, as I said, lots and lots more time.

Patrick Gladys · Environment Artist

No, actually not. We have actually gone through, I think it was two or three weeks, and we have reworked every single terrain texture that we had before and replaced them with, I think it was 80 or 90 new ones that are not just reworked, but they are based on realistic data, like photogrammetry data. It is actually photo-scanned, real-life material that is now in our libraries that we can use. And it's much higher quality. The definition on the ground is much higher now, so it's more consistent and coherent with what you see on the rocks, which has also been improved and updated. And it's one of these things: we are always picking a couple elements of our entire pipeline and thinking about how can we improve this? How can we raise quality, make this look nicer, more consistent, more coherent and such? And when it comes to the painting tools, one important aspect that probably not many people think of right away when we mention it like this: a speed increase for us means that we have more time to iterate, right? If I have to do one paint pass instead of five paint passes, that means I have five times as much time to spend on this content and really polish it out until it works the way I want it to, and spend more time raising quality, polishing things out, tweaking things, adjusting and so on.

Patrick Gladys · Environment Artist

We have a method of cutting holes into the terrain, specifically for caves and such. I think it also works for the ocean, but generally we don't do that, because simply by adjusting the entire elevation of the planet, we decide where the ocean should show up and where it should not show up.

Patrick Gladys · Environment Artist

It's basically taking the existing information and starts pushing these things in and outwards based on a noise, based on a mathematical noise. Something similar would be this here, another of our nodes, which is called Vortex. So I have this noise up here, and I can put it into the Vortex node, and it's driven by this bottom noise. And by adjusting this, you can see that I can start swirling and moving the existing information around. So this is something very cool that you can do very interesting alien or even lava formations with.

Patrick Gladys · Environment Artist

So the custom ones that only I did are these ones: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. And then there are a lot of nodes that Sebastian did, because he's the techy guy. So these are my non-tech-artist nodes that just give me funky visuals. But he does crazy stuff. He does the intense things, like almost simulations on a 2D basis, for example, or the erosion node. So let's combine one of my nodes with some of Sebastian's nodes. Let's go for the Landform node, and let's take a look at a simple noise. So we have a very simple up and down, and I'm putting it into this Landform node, and I'm exaggerating the node properties here, and you can see how the existing data gets shifted around. So this is a very cool node, because I can basically make very believable terrain out of just two nodes. Because the idea behind this node was: how do land masses form, right? Land masses form by sometimes being moved around or shifting into one another and deforming and faulting and all of that stuff. So I thought, how cool would it be to just have one node that simply gives you that result in an instant, right? So this is already quite believable when it comes to the basic shapes, and now I can take this and further detail it out.

Patrick Gladys · Environment Artist

But remember when I told you about how our height maps are splattered on the planet, and sometimes if there are two right next to one another, they will be blending together as well. So we can check that out as well here simply by flying over and seeing how it all behaves. So look at this. This is the exact same height map, but it sits here multiple times and blends together and forms an even greater landscape, an even greater mountain range, instead of just being a single dot on the planet that gives you that individual mountain.

Patrick Gladys · Environment Artist

So, it is something that we have been discussing in the team as well, and yes, there is an option. If you take a look at this square over here, I can take, for example, the Obsidian Dark biome and paint it down, and you can see that it automatically gets applied here. So what we could do, because each and every corner of this texture resembles specific humidity and temperature situations: the top right is cold and dry, the bottom right is hot and dry... warm, dry, warm, wet, and then cold, wet. So I could basically go in and paint something in that would logically resemble some climate, for example, if it was Earth. Where it's cold and dry, I could put my Arctic areas and really paint this square out completely unrelated to any planet or anything really. And then we could throw any data at it and it would redistribute this data logically. So the answer would be we don't have to go in and adjust the painting all the time and repaint our biomes. Because you can see even only this local height map here already adjusts to the new data. And the same thing is happening globally. It's the very same logic being applied there. So just by adjusting our workflow slightly, we could totally do that.

Patrick Gladys · Environment Artist

The power of DevTools. You can see that what we have been adjusting and modifying right now is index or patch number three. We tweaked patch number three. Right next to us is patch number zero. And let me show you something. We have a list in our planet editor tools. This is something that we don't show off quite frequently, but you can see that we have our ecosystems, and what we call those ecosystems are all the height maps. This is the list of all the height maps that we use on all our planets. We have hills, we have ice dunes, we have the mining pits. You have a preview of all of it here. You have the mining pits, you have mountains, eroded, and all of that stuff. So it's a huge library of height maps, all kinds of flatlands, beaches and so on. So what I can do is simply select that patch and, for instance, fill it with something entirely different, which is Mountain Billowy 02. See, these are the Billowy Mountains, and you can see that the data already adjusted. But if I go back and put in something entirely new, see, everything moved with it. Let's take a height map that you guys have never seen before. It's not on any of the current planets yet. See, I can just go through this library and decide, okay, what mountains could fit best. And you see these funky colors, right? It's 0 to 15, so we have 15 patches, 15 slots that we can fill. So I can decide on a lineup of 15 different height maps.

Patrick Gladys · Environment Artist

Okay, so it is the exact same texture every single time.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Like when we had that blob at the beginning, some places we had one blob, some places we had two blobs.

Patrick Gladys · Environment Artist

Exactly. The blob was probably the best example for that. But fundamentally, it's the thing that I've already explained to you. The third patch here is isolated, right? There's no third patch around it. But if we check this spot, for example, there are two patches next to one another. So what the planet tech does for us, let's take these mountains, for instance: it takes a height map and then it starts shifting it around, and then it starts blending it with itself. So you will get to see a somewhat new and unique look every single time you pass by this height map, because it's blended together with its surroundings in a new way every single time. So yes, it is a little different every single time, but it's still the same texture. We have these tricks and processes that allow us to make it look super unique by shifting the information around, blending it with all its surroundings. And the cool thing is every other height map does the same. And by that, you get this huge mumbo jumbo of blended height maps and everything looks kind of unique.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So one version of three is blended with two and four, so it looks one way, and then another version of three is blended with 14 and 15, so it looks different.

Patrick Gladys · Environment Artist

Yeah, every height map affects all the other height maps.