Sculpt, Paint and Add Grass! Progress on the Terrain Tools (Patreon)

Good Friday to you’all :)! 

It’s Richard, for a new post on our progress on the terrain tools. I will be summarizing the work on terrain painting and sculpting made by Alex, Andrei, Chloé, Jérémie and I ( in alphabetical order).

Alex and I made a video to show how it looks and feels. You will also hear the ambiance and tool sound effects that Andrei has been adding to the game. My favorite part is the “krum lum bululuuluul kluc”. 

Note that this Patreon post is for Patrons only so please don’t share it, thank you! 🔒

Terrain Brushes

You can now paint the terrain with different textures. Some textures also include 3D models like grass, flowers, rocks and more. Below is an example of some of the textures and models Chloe made for the tool. I’m not an artist, but I hope it looks nice 👉👈.

A stairs block to walk up the hill, with a nice table to eat outside, surrounded by a field of flowers. I made a quick path going through the small grass.

An outhouse in the forest surrounded by wild grass!

I can hear you ask: but is there grass in the outhouse? We thought of it! Jérémie and I worked on all the behind-the-scenes magic to make sure that grass is never shown inside.

An outhouse in the forest with no grass inside :)

Terrain Sculpting

We also worked on the terrain sculpting tool. Alex added contour lines to make a topographic map effect. With this, it’s easier to see the elevation while sculpting.

Contour lines are shown to help when sculpting the terrain. 

What happens when I elevate the terrain around a house? Well, we have made it so you can have part of your house underground. While working on this, we also looked at what was needed to make proper basement work and we decided to move that to later in development as there are a lot of details to figure out. 

A house that is partly underground.

Here is a look inside my little semi-underground cabin. You can see the terrain is at a higher level than the floor, but everything works :)

Terrain Sections

We have divided the terrain into sections. This means that, when we launch the tools to create your own town sometime after the release, you will be able to start with a small town, and increase its size later, if you want. For now, it is just a test tool but here is a quick look:

 Adding some terrain sections to a little neighborhood we had.

Bug and Fun Highlight Reel!

One of my favorite parts of gamedev is the funny or unwanted things you make while working on features. Here are a few of them:

 While working on getting the terrain tools using test textures, I had a little fun but it was also useful :). Do you think our ground should look like this in the final game 🙃??

 I may have made the sculpting tool too strong.

 A gif of the middle of development of the tool. I was testing new terrain brushes. We didn’t keep them, for some reason 🤔.

 I broke Jérémie’s work on the flowers. But that’s how you learn how things work. 

This feature is almost completed, We only have a few details to work on! I’m looking forward to seeing how creative y’all going to be with the terrains :D. I will leave you with an image of my whole scene:

Richard