(BGM: Stonefire - World of Warcraft Classic)
This is the second desert scene I touched since Dam of the Oasis, by the name I can ensure you this is directly inspired by World of Warcraft Thousand Needles and Made in Abyss Cups of Giants, maps that inspires me the most at all times.
This time however, I come with tasks as I am asked to showcase the tools I have developed. I have acquired consent from my senior tech artists and now I can show this sample scene with you all. Enjoy!
A Background Story of this Scene
To make the scene more immersive (and to share my DND world), I wrote up a page of background story to give some first glance during my presentation:
Eldor Deepstone, King of the Death Valley
In the realm of Droloru, where ancient powers and forgotten magics intertwine, the proud King Eldor Deepstone of the Gold Dwarves faced a harrowing defeat. Once the mighty ruler of an underground kingdom renowned for its riches and craftsmanship, Eldor was driven from his subterranean halls by relentless forces.
The elven armies, graceful yet unyielding, pursued him with a vengeance across the scarred landscape. Surrounded and outnumbered, Eldor’s fate seemed sealed. Yet, in the darkest hour, as the elves' encroaching shadows threatened to engulf his forces, Eldor made a desperate plea to the ancient giants of the land.
In response, the giants—behemoths of stone and myth—answered his call. With their immense strength, they lifted the beleaguered dwarven clan from the jaws of despair, setting them upon a floating citadel that defied the very laws of nature. This aerial fortress, a marvel of arcane and divine engineering, became their sanctuary—a stronghold as impregnable as it was ethereal.
For centuries that followed, the Gold Dwarves remained within their suspended bastion, casting their vigilant gaze over the desolate sands and treacherous chasms below. They looked upon those who dared to enter the Death Canyon with a mixture of defiance and vigilance, guarding their hard-won haven against any who might seek to challenge their new-found sanctuary.
Tech Art Breakdown of <Shoulders of Giants>
(My figma board of this project)
(Time lapse of camera angle from bottom)
(Time lapse of camera angle from top)
Unity HDRP Render Pipeline
I set up a HDRP render setting in the unity scene at the very first step for my pipeline
I did go through a debate with my senior environment artist on when should lighting be put into a pipeline. I proposed making lighting first during greybox, which my peers rarely do. But it turned out to be very effective when I can see good composition from the very start
I also added only one custom shader of unifying the wall and rock colors to save some time color coding
To wrap up I decided to add in volumetric fog to enhance the feeling of "sandstorm"
(first pass of my demo is to have lighting setup to feel like desert, and some greyboxes)
Procedural Generation:
City walls, bridges and gates are procedurally generated by Houdini
To make the bridge that connects rock platforms of different heights, I used curves in this method, marking the starting and ending points in Unity, and load HDA from houdini.
The bridge is using flat or 45-degree tilt for its modules in my demo. Relatively simple but effective when making huge non-curve bridges. It reaches a good discrete result that I like.
(Bridge example in Houdini during prototyping)
Generic cities (I call them towns) can be generated based on several inputs : length, width, direction of gate and direction of towers
In my demo I only wanted the gate to face toward my camera, so I only opened the gate there; it is always ok (and actually way easier) to put gates on all four sides
Something I wished I could do if I had more time was to make random flags or archery platforms on top of the wall
The giant wall in the back uses similar appoach, but was very easy to make (only two points needed in unity)
(Town defined by several inputs)
(Wall in the back serves as a visual blockade)
Gaea and Landscape Solutions
My initial assignment on environment was actually making auto-cliff tools for environment artists, that one-click generates all cliff rocks based on slope and normal direction
Interestingly, after I talked to some environment aritsts, I found out they didn't quite want the tool because the tool often places cliffs in weird directions or unpredictable places
So I talked to the teams and argued that maybe using Bridge cliff assets to directly cover greybox Gaea landscape would be a better solution. This took me less than 3 hours to finish this giant 1024x1024 scene.
(Placeholder landscape from Gaea -- low resolution perfectly OK!)
(Gradually placing the black rock to cover the base ground)
(Greybox landscape is fully covered)
Exterior tools:
Lots of Blender tools developed with Python : Renaming tools, grouping tools, center tools, resize tools, export json tools etc
Some Unity tools in loading json and auto-assembling prefabs
Because the demo uses modular assets, most tools are useful when managing those modules to get ready for houdini processing
(Blender toolbox with custom UI and functions, currently in Mandarin)
(My unity editor dev tools for classifying models, assembling and viewing, also in Mandarin)
First time in the industry, the happy adventure in Tech Art
All these tools and scenes dont come all of a sudden in "boom". No it really doesn't. I worked for two months to get everything to this stage. The demo alone took two weeks to finish from greybox.
I honestly was scared at first when I am asked to develop the Blender-Unity workflow that we used in Mecha Break. I had little experience with Unity HDRP, and I was worried if the learning curve was going to be steep. Not to mention the language barrier I had when I worked in a Chinese company.
The experience of stepping out of the comfort zone was in fact very pleasing to me. Although Unity is now often brought up as old-fashioned and hard-to-use, I saw some good sides about it that I did not see before. The pleasure of developing houdini digital assets also made me certain that I love doing tech art as a job.
And of course, you want to ask why a "fantasy medieval world" in a sci-fi pipeline. Well, I was also unsure if my seniors were going to approve my proposal on making this demo, but I am surprised they liked it. I still feel amazed I can develop some of my favorite world settings in this piece of work, and I am happy to say I enjoyed it.