This was a rough one. As I got deeper into the process of creating a set I realized that I wanted to do a large sweeping landscape with one large asset as the focal point. I was splitting up time between trying to flesh out an interior and create the larger shapes when people suggested during the review that I focus primarily on the landscape. I decided to do that, but I was not really prepared for the lack of environmental tech-art features unity came with. Creating a decent tiling breakup shader required actually learning how to write unity’s implementation of HLSL instead of an easy solution being provided in the shader graph. The second issue was the performance hit caused by the forest. I was not able to get nearly the foliage coverage I wanted without tanking my FPS. The poor aesthetics were compounded by the fact that I am not good at making leaf cards look good and I decimated the trees as much as possible to squeeze out extra performance. Overall, I am not particularly impressed with the results. The technical issues were substantial and I got too focused on creating perfect shader solutions for both far-away and closeup gameplay instead of just committing to one.

Moving forward with this piece, I think I will either need to scrap the landscape and exterior and focus soley on the interior using a traditional UV and substance painter workflow, or port the entire project to UE5 to get the performance and toolsets required to create a large environment piece.