Low Poly Rocky Terrain Techniques ?

Onion

Hi,

I'm modelling a desert based track, that runs through a mountainous pass ( personal project in Unity ), and I'm wondering if anyone could help out with some techniques to help me come up with something nice.

My scene is low poly and targeting handhelds / mobile kind of res / power.

I have a cliff edge with a few variations of the texture, which I tweak and paste around, but when playing / looking over the overall scene, it does appear very 'samey', so I'm hoping for tips on how to create better looking mountainous landscapes that look good / different as you pass them, but targeting low poly. I mean, what techniques are people using in other low poly games to create these types of areas, I've seen some very good ones recently, where it looks like the whole area is textured differently and geo. wise very different also, even though it's on a mobile.

The game I'm kind of referencing here is Asphalt 8, the scenery is superb, and looks like it's all unique, how would I set about creating something similar ? Would any specific landscape generation tools be used ? And then how about texturing, lots of textures, or clever multi-layered / decals, etc ?

Any help appreciated.

Thanks

NAIMA

Pics would help to judge but...

Try to make some models of rocks using all the same tileable texture , make them varied and low poly.... Possibly so that can be rotated and placed in different angles and positions so that will look like different rocks all times...

A big rock could have several interesting sides and be reused several timesto intrude and mix with other elements, perhaps a couple of cliff models and some other rock debris or medium sized ones to enrich and vary the scenes.

Onion

Hi, thanks, it's not so much singular items like rocks and stuff, but the longer scale mountainside type stuff, I mean what is the best methods to visually make an extended rockface look completely individual for it's length.

Examples : -









As you can see, some bigger rock / cliff type topography, I'm confused a little to how they build it, is it generated in a terrain generator, and then how would it be textured to give that unique texture over it's length.

I've produced a couple of large textures, which I've turned into a modular asset, and tweaked the mesh as it runs over the course, so it's overhanging or pulled back, etc, it just ends up looking like a game from way back, when I know it could look much better...

sprunghunt

it looks like they're using tiling textures in those images - but they are using vertex color to blend together some different textures so you don't notice it.

Onion

Yeah, I can see some textures are blended, especially on the roads, would they really apply that technique to the whole scene ( essentially rendering everything ( vertices ) twice per frame because of the way any gpu would handle that data ), ?.

The snowy landscape is a particular question mark for me, I can do something similar, but never seems to end up looking nice.

Anyway, regardless of texturing technique, I'm still curious how the actual landscape is generated ? pure modelling, or a terrain generator with roads then inlaid thereafter ?

sprunghunt

Onion wrote: »

Anyway, regardless of texturing technique, I'm still curious how the actual landscape is generated ? pure modelling, or a terrain generator with roads then inlaid thereafter ?

It could be either of those options. I've seen both used. They could also be using a terrain editor like the one in the cryengine editor or UDK.