The Lost World

Based off the book The Lost World. I was in charge of mapping and texturing the terrain in Unity's Terrain Editor as well painting in the trees and foliage and laying out our modeled assets. I also modeled and textured Cave City, some props, and the final waterfalls. In pre-production I created the environment concept art.

Other environment models were made by Dan Siebert and textured by Dan Siebert and Jennifer Stolzer. The trees were a combination of the those made and textured by Dan Siebert and Unity's built in trees. Dead tree props were made by Esma Dautovic. Shown Dinosaurs were built and rigged by Josh Dicarlo. Dinosaur textures and animations were done by Jennifer Stolzer. Dinosaur concepts were made by Jennifer Stolzer and Josh Dicarlo. Original programming by Jason Murdick. We worked on this project February 2009 to mid July 2009.

The initial rough layout was done by Josh Dicarlo. After it was handed off to me, I smoothed it out, detailed the various areas, created and painted ground textures, laid out the various assets for each area, painted in trees and foliage, and created paths. Initially we had the Plateau roughly the same size as our real life reference plateau, 10000 units by 10000 units and 2550 units high.

Two thirds of the way through the project we finally admitted that size was way too large. So I reduced the length and width to a quarter of the original and the height by a third for a size of 2500 by 2500 units by 887.5 units high. I then had to rework the landscape to fit the new size and our assets, which hadn't been scaled down. I also had to repaint the trees and foliage as well as some of the terrain texture placement. Though this created extra work, it decreased travel time and made separate areas more accessible and easier to explore. We kept the map resolution the same at 2048, so I now had greater control with the detail of the height map and texture map as well as with tree and foliage placement due to the new compressed physical size.

Top View

Top View with Guide

These textures are hand painted and tile in all four directions. They were painted at 1024x1024 and reduced to 512x512 for in-game. The Normal Maps were made in ZBrush.

Mossy Grass 512x512

Dirt and Grass 512x512

Mossy Rock 512x512

Rock 512x512

Cave Ceiling 512x512

Cave Ceiling ZBrush

Cave Ceiling ZBrush with Texture

Cave Ceiling Normals 512x512

Cave Wall 512x512

Cave Wall ZBrush

Cave Wall ZBrush with Texture

Cave Wall Normals 512x512

Environment Concepts: Below Plateau, Ancient Ruins, Pinnacle Accent

Environment Concepts: Cave City 1, Lake Shore, Forest Escape