Hebrides isle environment

Hey guys, I'm creating an environment in the style of a Hebrides island.

I'll be posting my progress, and breaking down how I did things, so I hope somebody will find this useful.
If you have and questions or critique, I'd love to hear it!


Edit:
Current progress pic:

 

Reference Images



Concept:

 

Progress on the terrain in world machine. Not done yet, but it's staying true to the concept:

With a quick color overly

 

More advanced animations on the grass and rocks and water can be added, but overall, it is a good one.

 

Far from finished here

Update: Pulled my heightmap into blender and started sculpting the cliffs

 

Yep, looks much better.

 

Took a few days away from this, but I'm back on it.
Finally got around to finishing the cliff sculpt

 

After a few mind-numbing hours of re-topology work, I have the final mesh:


Clocks in a a hefty 10k tris. My index finger needs a rest


Here is what it looks like with ambient occlusion baked into from the high poly. Really seeing it start to take shape

 

More progress on the diffuse texture.

I masked everything off by color and the painted my textures. I used my color mask in photoshop to cup out the textures.




Masking using the AO as a guide:


Painting in my cliff texture:


Painting in my grasses:

 

Took a break from the texturing process to work on the lighthouse base.

 

Looking awesome, seems like a very unlikely placement for a lighthouse though : p

 

This looks quite nice, keep it up!

 

Thanks for the kind words

This is my inspiration. I want to make it seem precarious

 

Awesome picture.

 

Pulling this one out of the dustbin to complete it. Here's a quick update:

 

Ok, so I needed to add some detail to the island. I didn't have a shader that would fit my needs, so I made my own. I need to switch between a rock, sand and grass detail textures while still keeping the same overall colormap and normals, and without sharp seams. Here is my solution:



Basically the shader I came up with uses a simple splat map, consisting of the just the green channel, the alpha channel, and black.


I used this to choose between my detail textures. I then used a desaturate function to remove the color information from my detail textures, and overlayed them onto my diffuse albedo, so that they use the color from my main colormap. Examples:





I'm pretty happy with how it turned out; my detail normals mix perfectly with my main normal map:

 

Awesome

 

Took some time to finish up the lighthouse.

Made some color adjustments to the island:

 

Quick update:
created a nice rock pack for the environment:


Here are a couple sketchfab scenes with the rocks (low res textures)

This is what they look like in engine with full res textures and a detail overlay:


Messing around with some placeholder vegetation as well:

 

Spent the day creating grass and flower prefabs. Drove around for a bit and collected specimens for a little photoshoot, and had a friend help hold the plants





Grass isn't my strong suit, so I expect this will take a lot of tweaking before I' happy with it, but so far so good