Patrick Gladys · Senior Environment Artist, Frankfurt

Yeah, right now it does, because I'm basically just blocking in huge areas with different colors. But if I just reduce my brush radius, and then once I'm happy with the entire layout of what I'm putting down here, I can then do a second detail pass of where things might go. So I'm again picking the snow, or white, and I'm basically going in and working on transitions, or how the snow kind of blends in with all the other areas. So simply just by clicking, I can determine where these things should go. And then if we go down, I can even go down to a ground level. Oh, this is dark now; let me go to a spot where it's actually bright. So I can go all the way down to a ground level and then basically paint in quite detailed areas of snow, where it sits and how it blends into the entire rest. As simple as that. So we start off like that, but everything that the players see on the planets right now, and the entire color information, is actually painted down like this by an artist. It's just that if I went back to that spot again and I wanted to start doing my detail passes, I can, for example, increase the smoothness here and then reduce the opacity of the brush, kind of like you would know it from any other painting tool. And then I can start detailing these areas out, or take a contrast again and add a bit more detail. And then you can kind of see how it picks up on a lot of the information that comes with the terrain, and I'm basically filling that information with color. And that's basically how artists go in and work through the entire planet, or that simple square that I have shown you, until they get something like this. So someone actually went in and applied these darker areas of sand and brighter areas of sand. But the important thing to note here, even if I'm looking at this specific pit, and some artists have to wrap their head around this before actually starting to construct planets, is that painting this area doesn't mean that I'm just painting this area. So if I would just zoom out now, you can kind of see that I'm actually affecting a huge portion of the planet. Just by painting that one pit, I would change the entire area that's blue right now. Any small, minute modification that I do to the planet is represented everywhere else where the humidity and temperature data is the same as at this spot. So if I now enable temperature again, this is not very visible, but maybe it is visible on stream: there's very subtle grayscale differences here. Now let's look at humidity again. The humidity is a bit more. So you can see that the pit here has different humidity values than those protrusions or these hills here. So every single height information that we have on the planet that's basically covering the surface, let's say the mountains and such, hills, or these mountains here, they are all coming with the same set of data as the planet does. And then we blend them together in that way, which is super different from how V3 worked. Let me demonstrate. People probably already noticed by playing, but I can simply go in and pick some crazy color like this. Let's find a good spot, like this. And now if I zoom out, all the way from ground to orbit, you can still see it; it still represents a pixel on your screen. It's still there. And the cool thing about it is there's no blending happening between a planet texture and a close-up ground texture, which is fantastic. Because that way we could provide for details not just looking as if they would represent what's close up, but they are actually what is there close up as well. There's no blending happening in between this view and an orbit view. It's the exact same data we're looking at. There's no change happening when I fly out of the planet like this, which was fantastic.