This week has been a weird one, kind of slow and fast at the same time. A lot of time has been taken away trying to organise somewhere to live for next year while we do the game art masters, the time we have been in labs however some progress has been made in regards to the landscape... My goal this week has been shifted again to getting the landscape fully prepped and decorated, with a proper sun lighting pass and foliage. The first part of this has been working on getting the ground textures to look correct and set up vertex colour blending inside the level mesh material, as at the moment it just looks like grass is everywhere. Firstly, the level mesh material. I have already set up material functions for each different type of landscape surface so I can just call what surface I want in the level mesh material, making things a lot quicker while keeping things organised. Below you can see a cliff material as the base, a grass material, mud and cobblestone, each driven by a different vertex colour input.
I used material parameters going into each different material function to control their size, colour and tessellation amount inside the main material, allowing me to create an instance so I can eyeball the correct sizes inside the editor. (This is really important as these big landscape materials take ages to compile, so setting it up as an instance saves the waiting.) On Friday we went through the level thoroughly as a group identifying issues and getting down work notes for Easter. As I mentioned above I'm doing foliage which I have taken over from the other guys as it seemed easier to work on it alongside the landscape, so that's what I'll be working on over Easter along with shaders for the waterfalls and water. So a good amount to keep me busy!