Spacecraft: Planets
This post shows some work I did for the planets in Spacecraft at Shiro Games. Ever since I joined the team, this has been by far my biggest and funniest technical challenge. I took part in figuring out the workflow for planet creations, discussing extensively with the tool team, testing some things myself with shader codes to help figuring out what was important to implement and creating the final heightmaps and masks in Gaea. Huge shout out to the tool team at Shiro who did a stellar job at making this real and to Pierre-Etienne Traverse for his art direction!
Art Direction : https://www.artstation.com/petravers
Concept Art : https://www.artstation.com/babart
https://www.artstation.com/yoanvernet
Environment Art : https://www.artstation.com/simonbreumier
https://www.artstation.com/justinebrisme
https://www.artstation.com/guillaume_laval
Character Art : https://www.artstation.com/lilirose
Animation : https://www.artstation.com/celinenatasha
VFX : https://www.artstation.com/thomasnicolaysen3
https://www.artstation.com/lison_richoux
Additional Art : https://www.artstation.com/julienskf
https://www.artstation.com/maevadelaunay
Materials are blended on the Terrain using an RGB Mask: Black is Sand, Red: Erosion, Green: Slope and Blue: additional color blend
Tiling Heightmap sample made in Gaea
Point of Interest scattered on the planet for gameplay purposes (and to break the tiling)
Far planets are basically a grayscale mask made in Designer with a Color gradient applied to it.
Planet Color is driven by a color Gradient setup by the artists. HSV transform is performed on the planet material to get exactly the same average color far and close to the ground
A Mask is used to flatten some zones of the map randomly to break the tiling.
The Material blending mask is adjusted to remove cliffs when a zone is flatten, adding some erosion and sand to smooth the newly obtained mask
A mask is used to add a random amount of grass in valleys, adding more variation from one planet to the other