Patrick Gladys · Senior Environment Artist, Frankfurt

So the thing I just talked about, which is that very simple texture that drives everything, is basically what is being highlighted here. And it's different portions of that texture. We can take a look at it right now if you want to. But before I do that, I can basically just go through and stroke in here one more time so you can see that changes can be done quite easily and very fast. So now we're in a tool called Substance Designer, where we generate most of our content when it comes to ground materials, textures and so on. It is entirely procedural. So you see there are these large chains of operations going on, starting from noises, and then we start modifying them and stuff like that, without going into too much detail here. But at some point, when we start with a simple noise like this one, which is a Perlin noise, and we go all the way to the right where it basically shows the end result, because the entire graph is calculated from left to right, this part here is the result of it. So we end up at something like this. So what are we looking at here? I have talked about one texture, but we're clearly seeing two things. And what are these two? If I visualize it like this, so basically I just took that grayscale information from here and applied a little color to it to make it a little more obvious what this is all about. What we're looking at is the temperature information of our planet. And to further visualize that, I can actually have a view on my sphere here. So let's say this is our planet. As you can see here, the texture, if I chose the grayscale version of it, you can see that the dark values of the texture are at the top and bottom of the sphere, which is basically our North and South Pole. And around the equator, also if I view this texture here, you can see that here, the top and the equator here, this correlates, because it's mapped on the sphere right now. So around the equator we have the brightest values, which means the temperature there is greater than it is around the North or South Pole. So we have kind of a representation of what the temperature is like on our planet, and also these deformations and such, because you don't want it to be simple. There are all kinds of things going on on a planet, like mountains and oceans, and all of these things can influence how the temperature can behave on the planet. For example, if you go up a mountain, you would expect the temperature to drop gradually as you're moving upwards. That was the top one. Simple, temperature. Let's look at the bottom one, which is our humidity. Humidity and the temperature are basically combined in the end and saved out as one texture. But that one texture basically combines the data set, these two textures, so the information of our temperature and humidity. So I can also visualize that on our sphere here. And you can see that the humidity isn't simply a gradient going from the North Pole to the equator; it has a lot more breakup to it. There's a lot more variation going on. The humidity is also usually influenced by things like the ocean and mountains and such. Basically, these textures are completely artist-driven. We can create whatever we like. If I decided to swirl up that texture, that would actually be my humidity. So I'm entirely free to do that. Nothing stops me from doing that, except for maybe our art director, who would really dislike me for doing that. So we can do anything. There's no limits, but we try to at least have it be based on some physical phenomenon, like some phenomenon in weather and how mountains influence these two, and as I already said, oceans and maybe wind currents and all of that stuff. So we try to work as much of that information into these two. And the more precise it is, the better. But also we have to watch out and look for specific shapes that are in there, because if we go back to the editor and pick our painting tool again, these shapes are precisely what the painting tool will start picking up on. So if there was no variety in this texture, I couldn't get these interesting shapes that you see on the planet or moon right here. So this texture gets combined and exported, and then it looks a little funky. It looks like this. But that doesn't really matter. In the end, it's really the individual channels that the texture is made of that matter to us. So why can I paint on the planet like this? How are the textures combined and how can I paint on them? So you see that the highlight is around the equator now, and it's because around the equator I have a specific humidity value which is different from another spot on the planet. Oh, this is actually a good one. We have this brighter area and this darker area here. If I hover above it, you can clearly see that my highlight changes. That means that the data underneath is changing as well from this spot to that spot. Because if it was the same data, this would all be white or dark, or bright sand or dark sand. And I can further visualize that by simply picking the planet and then showing you, here is the humidity. So for example, here where we get brighter values, it's very humid. And then here in the darker areas, it's very dry. If I had to compare that to, let's say, Earth, where you have the same temperature... Let's look at the temperature again, because you can totally see that we have mostly brighter values here in the temperature, which means there's a very similar temperature in this region, but still I get a different look because the humidity differs. So let's say it is hot and dry. You would probably expect a desert. But if it was hot and very humid, you would probably expect a jungle that's very lush, and the humidity would be super high if you entered the jungle. So this is how we can control and have variety even though we are in the same region when it comes to the temperature. If I hover just around the equator, you can see how that highlight never reaches the pole, because at the pole we have a different temperature, and therefore I can paint this area individually from this area.

Jared Huckaby · Host

Because it's taking a measurement between the temperature and the humidity.

Patrick Gladys · Senior Environment Artist, Frankfurt

Exactly, because both data sets of temperature and humidity are working together at all times. They are basically being blended together and they work at the same time, not individually. So you're using both at the same time when you paint.