Common Art - Week 15 - Final - 'A' Stage

 

Terrain Texture V2

Grass V2

Sand V2

Substance Designer GrassV2

Based on the feedback from Stage B, I reworked both the grass and sand materials.
For the sand, I mainly lowered the saturation and brightness so it wouldn’t look so yellow.
For the grass, I pushed the style further and basically rebuilt the material from scratch, which took quite a bit more time.

Combined with the new grass billboard setup I made later, the updated grass material now gives a very nice overall grass look.

The Modified Parts

Trees

Terrain Blending

At the same time, based on the previous feedback, I also corrected the trees on the ground.

Now each tree no longer points along the landscape normal, but instead points straight up.

Also following the last round of suggestions, I researched how to achieve terrain blending in Unreal.
This setup mainly uses Virtual Textures. To make the terrain blend, I use two textures:

• One texture stores the landscape height.

• One texture stores the landscape material.

Once I have these two pieces of information, in the trunk material I compare the world-space vertex Z value with the landscape height, then use triplanar mapping to sample the landscape texture.
This gives me the terrain–trunk blending effect.

Grass V2

The Reference "Sky"

Again, based on the Stage B feedback, I decided to rebuild our grass and switch to another approach.
This time I collected references from Sky (a game made by the same team as Journey) and recreated a similar grass look.

I implemented billboard grass (always facing the camera) together with a wind system, and they work well.
The wind effect feels very soft and pleasant: each clump of grass sways gently in a regular rhythm.

Since I also have access to the landscape color information, I added that into the grass as well.
For each grass pivot in world space, I sample the landscape color and use it to tint the blades, so every grass clump matches the color of the terrain under it.

Grass V2 Test

Apple Tree & Bushes

Apple Tree

Bushes

Finally, I also created an apple tree and some cute stylized bushes.
The apples on the tree use the same wind system as the leaves, so they also have a slight secondary motion and sway gently with the foliage.

The bushes are made almost the same way as the tree leaves, so I won’t repeat the process here.

P4V