Slides from my Siggraph 2015 talk

2. Authoring of procedural environments
in The Blacksmith real time short
Veselin Efremov
Unity Technologies

3. About...
● Veselin Efremov
● “The Blacksmith”
real time short

5. This talk...
● Overview
○ common approaches for environment authoring in
games
○ available tools
● Objective
● The method we used: pipeline description
○ A: High quality unique objects
○ B: Quick variation for backdrop objects
● Applications and opportunities

6. Overview
Common approaches in current games
Can we go procedural?

7. Overview
Common approaches in current games
● current state (summer 2014)
● previous generation games

8. Overview
Common approaches in current games
● manually sculpted
● photogrammetry

12. Overview
Common approaches in current games
● manually sculpted
● photogrammetry

13. Overview
Common approaches in current games
● photogrammetry
○ hard to do properly, especially bigger cliffs
○ limited man power in production team - 1 artist
○ needs scouting for suitable real-world objects
○ often soft edges on big objects

15. Overview
State of procedural environment assets
We looked at:
● Terragen
● Vue

16. Overview
State of procedural environment assets
We looked at some Terragen and Vue user
galleries

23. Objective
To author rock formations which are:
● natural looking
● as detailed as our budget allows (2048; 4096
textures)
● not time consuming to make. Not a modeler!

24. Pipeline
Use-case:
A: High quality unique objects
B: Variation in backdrop objects

26. Pipeline
Unique objects
● A procedural generation tool to create the hi-poly object
● Mesh exported and cleaned up
● Automatically optimised and auto-unwrapped

27. Pipeline
Unique objects
● Projection of Normal map, AO map
● Low poly mesh, normal map and AO map to dDo → a
base set of textures
● Substance Painter – particle brushes for adding specific
features in the texture (e.g. leaks)

28. Pipeline
Unique objects
● A terrain generation software to author the object
● Mesh exported and cleaned up
● Automatically optimised and auto-unwrapped

29. Pipeline
Terragen
Martin Huisman
http://www.cgscenery.com/

31. Pipeline
Unique objects
● A procedural generation tool to create the hi-poly object
● Mesh exported and cleaned up in MeshLab (free tool)
● Automatically optimised and auto-unwrapped

35. Pipeline
Unique objects
● A procedural generation tool to create the hi-poly object
● Mesh exported and cleaned up
● Automatically optimised and auto-unwrapped in ZBrush
Intermediate optimization step in MeshLab if the polycount
is too great

38. Pipeline
Unique objects
● Projection of Normal map, AO map in xNormal
● Low poly mesh, normal map and AO map to dDo → a
base set of textures
● Substance Painter – particle brushes for adding specific
features in the texture (e.g. leaks)

41. Pipeline
Problem
Can’t export a texture from terragen

42. Pipeline
Problem
Can’t export a texture from terragen
We have a very dense mesh -> maybe vertex
colors will do?

43. Pipeline
Unique objects
● Projection of Normal map, AO map in xNormal
● Low poly mesh, normal map and AO map to dDo →
albedo texture
● Substance Painter – particle brushes for adding specific
features in the texture (e.g. leaks)

46. Pipeline
Unique objects
● Projection of Normal map, AO map in xNormal
● Low poly mesh, normal map and AO map to dDo → a
base set of textures
● Substance Painter – particle brushes for adding specific
features in the texture (e.g. leaks)

48. Pipeline
First test
one continuous canyon segment
tons of problems
still has potential

52. Pipeline
After some experiments...
one rock wall
very promising

53. Add image

55. Pipeline
After some experiments...
single object instanced, scaled, rotated, squashed

57. Pipeline
After some experiments...
rock slate for the shore

60. Nuisances

61. OBJ takes forever to save and load
Terragen -> PLY
MeshLab -> OBJ
3DS Max -> FBX

62. Pipeline
Quick and easy custom backdrop objects

63. Pipeline
Use-case B:
We create a generic, reusable set of textures (albedo,
specular, smoothness, normal and occlusion maps), and
apply it to a large variety of in-game assets.

66. Pipeline
1. Several 16bit height maps are exported from Terragen
and made tileable (Photoshop)
2. A basic shape is created in 3DS Max and is tessellated.
3. The height map is used to displace it. Simple planar
mapping is applied.
4. Automatic optimization is used to create the final low
poly mesh.

67. Pipeline
5. The normals from the original (smooth) mesh are
copied.
6. A shader for procedurally mixing a second set of tileable
textures is applied to add variety (snow, moss, sand,
dust, etc.)
7. Vertex alpha and colors are used for manual per
instance control for additional color variation.

71. Problem:
Since it’s displaced from a height map, there are stretches

75. Problem:
Wasn’t really a problem in our case
Maybe it’s worth exploring using vector displacement
instead of height in the future

77. Problem:
All the shapes shading info comes from the normal map
The normal map is projected from a plane
How do we make it work for any geometry?

79. Solution:
Project the normals from the original mesh, before it was
displaced
Used Noors Normal Thief
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/noors-normal-thief

82. To recap:

90. Application
● various environments
○ canyons
○ rocky deserts
○ caves
○ icebergs
○ …
● teams of any size
○ cost-efficient, fast, and high quality

91. Ideas to explore
If we only had more time
● Adding details like cliffs on top of heightmap-based
terrains
● Clouds - render elements

95. Ideas to explore
● Adding details like cliffs on top of heightmap-based
terrains
● Clouds - render elements

96. Overview
Procedural clouds
Terragen and Vue user galleries

101. Overview
Procedural clouds
We can export a lot of elements

104. Thank you