This is one of the projects that I take most pride in. I have always dreamt of being on a team that created those realistic immersive environment that I adored and enjoyed. So when I got some time in Summer 2022 I thought why not make an attempt to do so. I got on the epic store market place and found myself all the environmental vegetation and foliage I would need. As I am not much of an artist myself I had to think how I can apply my skills to create a beautiful and realistic natural scenery.

After some research I came across Gaea. I quickly learned Gaea for the next two weeks and finally created a terrain mesh that I though was realistic enough for my satisfaction. You can see the different phases the terrain went through in Gaea at the end of the page in slides.

After that I had to make it playable for a game. I didn’t want to lose focus to designing a game so I just kept it as an environment to begin with. It took some tinkering with photoshop and other image manipulation tools such as ImageJ to make the export results from Gaea usable in Unreal Engine 4. Once in I came across another hurdle of painting this massive 5mile island.

Well I didn’t have the time or resources to paint the entire thing manually so I leaned on my programming skills to program an AutoLandscap material that would pain the whole terrain procedurally based on the inputs. Another obstacle to tackle was the word deformation and tessellation as every different texture needed different amount of deformation and tessellation to look realistic from different distances. I dug into the source files of Quixel Megascans to reveal how they achieve this effect on their materials and then I modified it to apply different amount of tessellation and world deformation for each different material I was using for the terrain.

So far I was really happy with how it turned out the final step was the water shader. It took some research to find out how to create all the different aspects of realistic water. Once the shader was made the major problem was to apply it in the intricate river system. Generally I had seen water shaders being applied to planes and then planes put in place where they are visually accurate. However for a terrain this size and realistically uneven that method was not possible. So after trying a few different things I duplicated the entire terrain. Raised the rivers layer higher then others and made others invisible while the river systems were applied with the water shader.

And this is how I was able to achieve this marvelous island environment ready for any game to be implemented on it. I also brought the project to VR so I could step into the world of my creation. Below are some of the pictures of the island from different angles and with different lighting effects along with a video render of how it would look in a game setting.