Whilst at Intrepid Studios I came up with an idea for a tool that would take the most commonly used functionality of external 3d texturing apps like Substance Painter, and implement it into a non-destructive workflow inside of Unreal 5. We called this tool and material Landform.

 

I pitched the idea to the team, and was able to start work on the system, alongside a small group of talented tech artists to help make this idea happen.

 

Landform is a material and tool combo that works in tandem that is designed to texture large objects like cliffs, mesh terrain pieces, and massive architectural models using a combination of blend textures, automatically generated masks (like curvature, crevice etc), vertex paint data and height information. The system can work on models with no-UVs, meaning it's fast to get quick sculpts into Unreal with final quality materials. 

 

The icing on the cake for Landform works in a non destructive way where it uses custom tech that bakes all the height information into a single texture, which can be used to automatically tesselate and displace the model using Unreal's new modeling toolset

 

This tool has allowed artists at Intrepid to work faster, produce higher quality assets, and see final quality materials on work in progress models, all whilst running at spec for a MMORPG.

 

Above is a live stream video put together to demo the tool to players, and help them understand the development process at Intrepid.