As an environment artist, and particularly on the procedural planets, how do you tackle designing each ecosystem knowing that they have to blend with each other in ways that you probably don't even know yet?

The blending of different height maps in general, if you have mountains and then you have sand next to it, works. Technology-wise, it can be done really well, but in some cases, it just doesn't make sense. For example, if you have a pitch black mountain and next to it you have white sand, it's obviously going to look a bit strange. But this comes from the art direction. They tell you, okay, this doesn't look good, we just have to change something. But basically, in general, we get concept art from the UK. Our concept artist sets up all these biomes, these ecosystems, what they're going to look like. He kind of takes them apart and also shows you how it's going to look on a global scale, also on a detailed scale, what kind of vegetation there is and rocks.

So when you guys are jumping into it, you have a really good idea at least what your target is. And then it's you working with tech to go, cool, how do we achieve that?

Because sometimes we hit a certain limit. What we did so far was very organic. Earth-like planets, we can get them looking pretty good. But now we're thinking of stuff like ArcCorp that's very mechanical. It's a huge cityscape basically. So we had to figure out certain ways on how we achieve that. So before we go into production, we always make sure that we have the tech there, that it can be used by the artists. Because in the end, we always need more than one dude.