Some more Landscape and Cliffs

As I was writing in my last post I needed to fix a lot of things in my landscape first of the fluid actors would leak into areas where it shouldn't be. I first tried simply moving the fluid actors down but unfortunatly the rivers would get to small so I had to go back and forth between mudbox and udk to bring the affected areas up. This was a fairly long process since I also found some of the rivers to thin as is and rendering out the height map to make it usable in udk made it pretty much a waiting game.

Additionaly I hated the transition between the different textures. As a response to that I created a shader, that would assign a texture depending on the angle of the area this was the result:

Furthermore I have been working on cliffs to flesh the map out.

Thanks for reading and have a good day.

Trees and Landscape

It has been quite a while since my last post so I have a lot to say at this point.
for the past few weeks I've been working on several thing that being trees, cliffs and landscapes. First of trees. after doing a few attempts at the way that James Burton made the trees for Ether (http://www.jhburtonma.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-trees-of-ether.html) I realized that kind of simply assembling trees quickly doesn't work very well for the style of our game so I had to come up with a new way of making it work. My solution was creating a set of tree trunks and branches following that I would take them into Autodesk Mudbox and sculpt each piece individually making sure I sculpt a smooth transition between trunk and branch so at a later point I can simply mix and match trunks and branches to get variation.
Here is a tree that I have created in that way:

Secondly I have been working on Landscapes.
The Process I went through was a fairly simple one I just created a plane in Autodesk Mudbox and from there started sculpting with the specifications our level designer gave me. Following that I generated a height map with which I created the Landscape in UDK.

For one I need to go back into the sculpt and fix some of the height information, so I don't have puddles in some areas where there shouldn't be. Secondly I'm not happy at all with the blending of the textures for the landscape so I need to do more research into that. A second solution for the bad blending would be to use a mesh with vertex painting rather then a landscape.

Thanks for reading and have a good day.