Volcano
this was one of the four 3D scenes I made for my dissertation project. These four scenes are meant to show narrative through game environment.
Displacement Map Terrain Generation:
To generate the terrain of the terrain, I decided to experiment with displacement maps since it was a technique I didn’t use before. Displacement maps are black and white textures which modify the true topology of the object accordingly. This was a similar situation as the Bifrost generation in that it was mainly done for practice as opposed to practicality.
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For the map, I utilized a black and white image of a volcano of the TanDem-X satellite due top it sharing the properties of a displacement map image and matching the environment type that I wanted.
The displacement map was applied through maya’s hyper shade. By default the displacement map in maya only affects how it appears in render without affecting the geometry due to it being treated as a preview, in order to make it actually affect the geometry I had to use the bake selected geometry tool. The result of the displacement map was then altered through nomad sculpt to give it more distinct depth due to nomad having stronger sculpting tools in comparison to maya.
Preparing For Texturing:
I started with island based UV mapping, after which I decided that it would be a good idea to use normal based UV mapping. Despite normal based UV mapping causing some stretching, the natural textures would have still done workable texturing while keeping the flexibility to change and update the mesh easier. I started expanding the terrain to make the environment make sense in the context of the render camera. The method I used to expand the mesh was duplicating the mesh, mirror the mesh through setting the size as a negative number, combine the two meshes into one mesh, bridge the edges of the two meshes together, add cuts to match the sizing of the topology and smoothed out the seam to further match the topology’s sizing. This process was repeated twice and then UV mapped once again one the satisfactory detail in the field of view of the camera was added.
Initial Texturing:
The main texture for the volcano terrain was the same as the modified paper texture used on the temple’s platforms as to tie in the two terrains together. It is important to note that even though they had the same stand in colour, the beam and the blobs have different texture sets in order to give it more flexibility when it comes to adding the shaders.
Retexturing:
For the volcano, there wasn’t much that was changed in terms of the substance painter textures apart from making it darker for the reason of unreal engine’s colour handling. In terms of the lava flow, I used a modified version of the logic for the water shader. Initially, the idea was for there to just be a moving normal map (figure98). After experimenting with just moving the normal map, I decided to experiment with adding a moving colour map to it as well to help give more detail to the texture. Through some experimentation, it was found that if there are two instances of each texture panning in different directions it created an effect where it appears that it has a different level of solidification which gave it a more dynamic and lava like look. Additionally, lighting from point lights was added to help the lava look like it’s glowing while at the same time not affecting the texture itself as adding it from the lava’s emission reduced some detail from the shader.
