
Hearthlands Biome | Meadow Biome | [/tr]
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Wilderness Biome | Snowfields Biome | [/tr]
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1. Photoshop
Our Game Designers work in a specific Photoshop file, where each layer is assigned a different color. They paint a Gameplay map, which you can see above, and a biome map.
- Red: Mountain region (Gameplay element)
- Blue: Water and rivers (Gameplay element)
- Green: Forests & trees (Gameplay element)
- Purple: Locations (Gameplay element)
- White: Roads (Decoration element)

2. Houdini
No, not the magician. The program. We have a Houdini server that utilizes .bat files to generate the maps, once it has the layers in the correct place in the Unity folder. Game Design executes the .bat file, and in 10-15 minutes the adapted terrain is available in unity. And this is what’s happening in the background:


- Heightmap
- Flowmap
- Detailed map
- Texture masks
- Normal maps


3. Substance Designer



4. Unity
Once we have all the textures and maps we need, we import them into Unity.



5. & 6. Substance & Unity
After finishing the terrain and being happy with it, our Lead Environment Artist can go in and do another pass to create the decoration textures and import them into Unity. This “decoration pass” is a procedurally generated VFX layer based on the decoration texture. This way we can define where random props are placed, where beaches are or, where fishes spawn in the ocean, or where gusts of wind are allowed. Thanks to our Config files, these assets (fishes, leaves in the wind, stones & rocks, etc.) can all be Biome specific. Makes sense, right?


