Recreating the Land of Nomads - Landscape Breakdown in Manas
A breakdown of making the landscape environment for Manas. There was a lot difficulties met during the year but I also met great colleagues and friends during the time and together pioneered this great work! This piece of work was for a team game project so my apologies if we sacrificed some graphic qualities for performance reasons, but I wish this will be helpful for people interested! Best of luck! It is now game ready and visible to all!
Final in-game result
Day time Variant (Before Battle)
Village close up (set-dressing by @Hamza Kamil)
Kicking things off, in order to make the cutscene at this angle where Jakip and Manas met after village attack, I worked this angle from the concept art from @Dom Bayarsaikhan
To reach the effect of having a closer playable area and a vista farther away, I chose to have Main Landscape as the playable region, and Snow Mountain Vistas as nanite mesh to optimize performance.
To breakdown how I did the landscape material. I used 5 different maps in this auto-material. By slope it will calculate whether to put grass or cliff, and vary them by blending in stones and dirt.
Similarly, grass and rocks are directly spawned on top, with spruces handpainted by our level designers to guide players.
I used nanite on vistas and trees to boost performance. Therefore, although this is a huge landscape to play on, there is no big issue with the performance and can run 120 fps smoothly. Quad view and lighting view are also here for reference