Battlefields Embankments
Here, you'll find the terrain assets I created for the World at War theme. The goal was to develop a set of objects that could retain detailed terrain for vertical elements—allowing for the creation of trench-like layouts as well as simpler excavations.
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I drew inspiration from old history books featuring schematics on castle siege tactics, as well as our key concept art. Historically, most castle sieges involved the creation of zigzagging trenches in a thunderbolt-like pattern. From the start, I knew I needed to create vertical walls, corners, and small dirt stacks leading up to large mounds to replicate this strategic layout.
Due to time constraints, I opted to use a master Substance Designer (SBS) graph to sculpt the shapes, I even injected a bit og gaea erosion on some. I first created simple low-poly meshes for collision, tested them in-engine, and then tessellated them to displace my materials.
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The shapes were divided in 3 parts vertically, trench bottom, wall, ground level and I divided my sbs the same way. It allows me to work in Designer seeing the final result and simply jump into Zbrush to height push the final asset. Those assets were then baked, layered in engine with tilable dirts and arrange to create chunks of trenches (straight, corner, ends, etc...) .
The shapes were divided in 3 parts vertically, trench bottom, wall, ground level.
I structured my Substance Designer graph the same way, allowing me to preview the final result directly in Designer before jumping into ZBrush for the final height pass.
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Once displaced and slightly sculpted, these assets were baked, layered in-engine with tilable dirt textures, and arranged into modular trench chunks (including straight sections, corners, and endpoints).
The ramp and mounds were more classical in term of sculpt with alpha drag, sculpt and surface noise.
To go along with the terrain assets I also created few wooden structures and made a quick in game benchmark.
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These battlefield embankments were the first terrain assets created for the project. The Singapore Art team wanted additional support assets to reinforce the World at War theme. With just over two weeks available, I was really excited to contribute to this subject.
Big thanks to Gabriel Tan, Singapore Art Director, for his trust and Theophile Lebeau for the support !
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Art Direction, Thierry Dansereau
Lead Architecture, Dominic Gladu-Despatis
Lead Texture, Dimitri Alexis
Lead Props, Antoine Barbot
In game usage of the battlefields embankments. This recipe was heavily use in war zone such as Harima.
4 of the main assets I built to create the modular recipe that would help dress up the terrain.
The kit also included a custom ramp, giant mount, corner pieces but also dirt stacks.
All the embnakments were fleshout in Designer, you can see here the same embankment height applied to a cylinder and to a terrain asset shape.
Overview of the embankment surfacing with snipsets of some key steps.
Zbrush pass to do the final displacement push to create the high-rez and to decimate a low-rez version.
The giant ramp and mount were sculpting by hand, kitbashing few landslide here and ther and using chunk of custom mud height map as alphas.
The dirt piles had there own graph as they are horizontal and have specific features such as rubbles and erosion lines.
Final Modules in engine after Designer sculpt, Zbrush sculpt, baking and layering in engine.
The modules were then used to create sub-groups (small chunks of setups).
The sub-groups were used to build up a msater group which is the final agencement.
