I was brought on as an environment artist for Military Conflict: Vietnam, an FPS set in the Vietnam War, to create massive vistas for the battlefields in the game. I’m really happy with how they turned out! Making them really pushed my techniques and the Source engine to their limits, but they look fantastic.
All of the mountains featured are actual locations in Vietnam, sourced from a 30m DEM of the country. Once a location was selected, I used QGIS to extract the area and bring it into World Machine, where I refined it with noise and erosion. I then used the extracted maps to make a terrain texture. The heightmap, diffuse, and normal were then brought into Blender, where I painted trees on, removed hidden faces, and repacked the UVs. The meshes were then brought in-engine and combined with standard distance fog as well as custom fog cards that I made.
The final products each use about 5-10k tris for the terrain and ~50k tris for trees. Each terrain uses a 4k diffuse & normal (~10mb DXT1 ea), just 2 drawcalls total.
