Terraforming experiments

First design of an extraterrestrial landscape whose surface is covered only by lichens and algae. I will add the waters that are forming on account of the moisture there later. Here you can also see a still photo with an image of the base material in 3D Coat, that contains overall 4 layers and 8 texture maps, after little refinements with noise and masks. Subsequently I painted over the surface additionally with some dirty sculpt brushes.

• Landscape generation & mesh: World Machine
• Texturing, lighting, rendering: 3D Coat
• Video: VSCD Video Editor
• Further use: Unreal Engine

Scouting mission with atmosphere. The simulation of thin clouds hasn't been a problem, thanks to the effect filters of VSCD Video Editor. The rendering of the movie frames has been done with 3D Coat. ​

The transfer of the low-poly model to Unreal Engine allows it's use as terrain set for any purpose. After the export from 3D Coat the custom textures are still preserved and can be improved further.

A very simple setting in World Machine ensures provision of a terrain mesh and also of a corresponding heightmap, which must be a 16-Bit grayscale file (for the landscape editor of Unreal Engine). The resulting mesh is only used as model for the creation of textures in 3D Coat, but not for the final landscape in Unreal Engine. UE generates the solid of my sci-fi terrain from the heightmap alone (see below). 

Finally, the finished texture maps from 3D Coat will be imported into Unreal Engine (see below) and... hurray!

The lit terrain looks promising. In the next step I have to connect the color map with the landscape and then I will see what terrain improvements I can make with the landscape editor of UE.