how are massive game environments made?

large open world games will almost always feature these massive landscapes with mountain ranges cliffs and rivers normally to create these by hand artists would have to use sculpting software to painstakingly create rocks and other shapes that make up the greater landscape and silhouette of the environment now even with a large team of artists this creation process would take forever if your goal is to create an environment that spans miles across in every direction so to get around this developers who are creating large environments can use something called a procedural terrain generator which is usually a node-based software that can procedurally generate massive worlds by creating a height map and then extrapolating that data into 3d meshes not only do software like this allow you to create large landscapes and mountain ranges with relative ease but these terrain generation programs can also simulate a ton of really cool environmental aspects from generating lakes rivers and oceans to even simulating natural factors like dunes flows growth areas glaciers and snow to help shape the landscapes using a software like gaia a single artist would be able to create massive worlds in a relatively short amount of time much faster than having a huge team of artists create the world by hand procedural generation doesn't stop at terrain creation either it can also be used to populate landscapes with whatever the landscape requires like procedurally creating different types of grass based on the current biome you're in you could also use procedural generation software like houdini to build up entire cities filled with skyscrapers trees parks and even functioning streets however procedural generation does come with the downside fully procedural worlds end up looking samey and repetitive after you've done enough exploring anyone who's played a few hours of no man's sky will know what i'm talking about but there is an interesting way around this when designing a level or scene it's not exactly a secret that making a well-designed environment requires adding lots of personal detail to the level like adding trees rocks and human-made assets like houses and streets to add layers of visual storytelling looking at a game like red dead redemption which has thousands of examples of amazing little details added to each area of its massive environment it's hard to imagine how the hell the team managed to add so much micro detail in such a short amount of time but the answer is another fundamental technique that's used in most games you play maybe without you even realizing it this is where modular design comes in modular design is all about creating a themed kit or collection of parts that you can use to mix and match out to build larger unique creations think of how a lego set contains only a few unique parts but can be combined together to create an infinite amount of things based on your own creativity modular design allows artists to quickly build out large-scale scenes but also provides them the freedom to create granularly as well a slightly more custom solution on a smaller scale when compared to procedural terrain generation what i really love about modular design is that while you can create many different things with the modular kit using the same parts over and over again keeps your art direction focused on a singular theme so no matter how much you build with your kits the designs and style of your world will never stray far from what you originally intended for example let's say you wanted to create a huge castle that has a bunch of different buildings inside of it you could create a modular kit for it first you would create a few different rooftops walls of varying sizes with two to three different textures a few archways and some towers and maybe some steps of different shapes to mix in there and whatever else you wanted to add to it you can then mix and match these pieces in almost an infinite amount of waste and create a completely unique castle and its surrounding town in a relatively short amount of time now making the modular kit itself takes quite a bit of time but once it's done you're able to build very quickly this is how games like red dead redemption and many other large open world games are able to build out these huge towns and cities but still maintain the ability to remain interesting when players stop to take a closer look by generating the land procedurally then using modular kits like rocks fences and roads to build out the scenes and then creating individual custom assets to fill in the cracks teams can rapidly create worlds that seem like they took decades to make so yeah environment art is pretty cool

Channel: Stylized Station

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Id: cAr7aj_MPMc

Length: 4min 7sec (247 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 08 2022