Patrick Gladys · Senior Environment Artist, Frankfurt

But we said we wanted to put down a forest, and now we actually put down two things. So we have these dark rocks and our savannah. Okay, and now let's zoom out and let's modify this so it occurs in a different area. So I'm going to go back and change my textures again. Temperature goes here, humidity goes here. And now I'm just updating that texture again. That didn't work for some reason. Let's do it again. Now it works. This thing needs to pop up in order for it to work; sometimes it gets stuck. All right, so now you can see that it changed. It just jumped a little because we changed the data. So if I go in here, you can see that this is not matching anymore, and that's exactly the reason why we have to reload the planet, because the object scattering behaves a little differently than simply applying color. So I will have to just reload that planet, and then we will see the dark rocks in these snowy areas here and the forest around them. Okay. Now I can fly back in. And you can totally see we have... wait a second, maybe here. I will explain what goes wrong here, because we are in an area where the ocean level starts to creep in, and I'll explain what happens precisely. But you can see that we have the dark rock and then the savannah right next to it. So this updated properly. So why do we get the coral spawning in here? Why does that happen? This is weird. I didn't paint this down. I didn't want this to happen originally. But what the objects can basically read out, and what they are also driven by, is what kind of elevation on the planet they are sitting on. And we can basically turn objects on and off based on what elevation level they are on. So the reason why you are starting to see coral in this area is because we are actually below ocean level. We are very close to being at ocean level. The thing is, this planet is based on Daymar, and Daymar doesn't have an ocean. So that's why we can simply hover above the ground and wonder why coral appears. But it's actually good that it happened, because then I can explain that if this was, let's say, microTech, this is how we can control that, for example, on a hill or at higher elevation, there should be these spruce tree, pine tree forests that are completely snowed over. And then as you move down in elevation towards the frozen ocean that you find on microTech, we can, for example, say, okay, at ocean level zero or minus one, and that's in meters, we want ice blocks to spawn, or shifting ice sheets on the ocean, and that way we can detail out the ocean. If the ocean wasn't frozen, we can simply turn off the frozen ocean feature, and then you can actually see different types of assets spawning underneath the ocean level.