Patrick Gladys · Senior Environment Artist, Frankfurt

That gradient square, if I find it on the planet here. It was right around there. It is basically just the same data that is spread over the entire planet. If I just turn on humidity again, it's basically just the entire data range from the dark values to the bright values, from 0 to 255, and it's basically just condensed into a square. That's purely an artist kind of workflow that we came up with in order to, depending on what we do, save ourselves some time and work. Because if, let's say, I paint on this square, you can see that the entire planet changes as well. So if I want to save some time and be quicker in my workflow, I can simply start filling out this entire range here in the square, because it correlates to my entire planet. So we can try that out. I still have my white color selected and I'm going to tint this top left corner of the square. And now let's take a look at the temperature. Okay, the temperature in the top left corner seems to be cold. And now if I look at the humidity, it is in that case low as well. So it's not very humid and it's very cold. So what area on my planet describes very cold and dry areas? If we take a look, you can see that the area that describes these two are actually my poles. If I check the North Pole and I check the South Pole, there's even some more areas out here that also share this data, so they automatically get that color applied. I could do the same for, let's say, very hot and dry places. So we would go down, because it's hot, and then dry would also be here. So you can already see that the highlight is showing the exact same spot that we're viewing here. So it doesn't matter if I hover my mouse over here or actually on this square, because it's showing me the exact same data and spot. So in the end, I can just go in and start painting on this square. Do very, very little areas of modification, very condensed in just this little spot, but actually I'm influencing large portions of the entire planet and changing them right away. It's really just an artist workflow to speed things up. We can, for example, go in here and define a couple biomes: okay, we have the snowy areas in here, or maybe we have scorched, volcanic areas over here. I'm just visualizing right now with two colors. And then that's how we basically block in the individual areas that we want as biomes. Because it's the hottest and driest here and the coldest and driest here, so that kind of makes sense. If you know a little bit about weather conditions and temperature zones and biome distribution when it comes to planet Earth, you know that around here, somewhere in between the equator and the North Pole, there would be our temperate zone. So that's where most of Europe lies. That's where you have the broadleaf and needle-like pine tree forests and such. So I could already go in and block that out and be like, okay, this is where I want these areas to be. And then maybe we're moving further up to a tundra kind of environment, so I can start visualizing that. Of course, this is not final quality at all, but we would first determine where do I want these individual areas to be on the planet and how do I want them to sit, and use the data that is provided to me with the textures that I have actually built myself. So the painting passes and these two textures, they go together. One determines how the other thing looks or can behave. Of course, I can use the same data and do different kinds of paint passes. And we do that on some of the moons, but the players never notice, because we can give them the same data but give them an entirely different paint pass, so they look different and unrecognizable. It's unrecognizable that they are actually using the same data. So for example, I can just go in here and be like, okay, around my poles I want a region where it's just ice or something like that, and it transitions over all the way to my pine needle forest, and then there come the broadleaf forests or something like that. So we can decide quite easily and quite swiftly where things go.