Erosion Breakdown

Again I have the same image here from Tommy's-Dam. In this breakdown, we're going to discuss Erosion and how we built out the Level utilizing prototype mesh with the terrain geo as well as Rocks!

Let's start by breaking down this little chunk of Tommy's-Dam.

Here is a little vignette version of the previous image.

The parts highlighted in blue represent the terrain geo. The rest of the assets are all separate instanced assets placed in the level by @Anthony Vaccaro.

Here is an example of some of the mesh prototypes that were used throughout the level to build out the eroded embankments. Credit to Anthony Vaccaro for modeling out most of these assets.

These also utilize a 1 to 1 bake multiplied down the layers of the material. Here is an example sculpted by Anthony Vaccaro

Alright, Let's start with the frist Eroded Earth material I made here. This material works great for simulating a landslide, I wanted to keep the rocks cohesive with my river rocks in my previous posts, so I started with using those!

Here is the group of small/mid-sized river rocks I sculpted for Tommy's Dam

Here's the final sculpt, let's derive at least a simple ID Mask. You can see here my largest rocks are all separate, the smallest rocks I let it do automatically. We can make this better with Flood Fill in Substance Designer.

See my previous post about River Rocks to understand how I use my Zbrush bakes In Substance Designer! With our Height and Rock/Dirt ID mask we're ready to go!

These are our maps on the left, First thing I do is make any edits I need to the stones, then I add some small-scale detail to the dirt. Quickly adding surface detail in Substance designer instead of sculpting it in Zbrush.

Next step is using my River Rock Atlas with Shape Splatter to add some more small rocks/pebbles. The mask/color on the right shows just how many rocks I'm adding to my material in Substance Designer. Shape splatters Height Controls are very helpful here!

This gif goes over the above and beyond from start to finish. Notice I'm just adding dirt detail, then a boatload of little stones, and finally the finishing touches we'll go over next.

The last chunk of the graph is a series of Atlas Scatter nodes. This instance I'm adding some roots I sculpted. Refer to the River rock breakdown for this workflow! I then use some more sculpts, and some scans to add more detail.

Here is the base color generation. Pay attention to the final frames to see where I use Atlas Scatter to add in those extra details. The process here is exactly the same as the River Rock I posted previously for generating color!

Here is a fun shot looking up at some of the runny, wet eroded embankments

And finally, the outcome in Marmoset!

Alright, let's move on to the large forms landslide material.

Here is an ingame shot of the Landslide shapes forming these large deep channels in the game. I wanted to capture the really thick Erosion lines, the texture alone couldn't do this so I used the height map to displace the terrain and create a new mesh.

Here is a shot of the initial shape for the channeling, Sculpted in Zbrush quickly. I also created this roots atlas to to be used in this texture. I created this with Fibermesh and some quick sculpting

This material is heavily edited in Substance. The most important additions are the extra detail, non-uniform blurred to simulate directional erosion. Otherwise, it's rinse and repeat from the previous workflow! Layer in that chunky detail!

For the Albedo I'm starting with a gradient background color sampling real-world values. Then we start layering in detail. I added some grass/moss detail near the end to simulate that the Landslide happened a while ago and foliage is growing back on top.

And a quick wireframe if you're into that. You can kinda see the displaced geo in the middle on the bottom of the image

Another shot in the game looking at this chunk of landslide from the side.

The final material tiling in Marmoset

Here is a channeled Mud texture, I also use parts of this graph/material in others for the mud/channeling detail. I can even adjust the Uv's In the material and use this as a larger scaled paintable erosion for the terrain. Always think of ways to reuse!

Lastly this is the texture at would be at the bottom of the Landslide. My thought was all of the mud, dirt, rubble has rolled down to the bottom and I have gritty mud/dirt/rocky soil. Notice I'm adding the ground plants to these textures to unify them.