Self-Study 3 Moonscape

Today I had a go at creating a map from scratch using the Unity Terrain tools and ProBuilder tools to create some structures.

My initial inspiration for this map was the "Blood River" map from Dawn of War.

But I decided to pivot into a space/Halo inspired moonscape with my bowling pin model from a few devlogs ago.

I imagined it being a huge alien monolithic structure build by an ancient civilization that worshiped a bowling god.

The map features a sprawling mountainous terrain littered with strange alien structures built an unknown age ago.

In the center of the map is a land bridge with archways at each end acting as entrances to the area. This land bridge acts as a viewing platform for the giant bowling pin sitting off center.  

I thought about using a flat dirt model for the ground but eventually settled on this grass texture, which combined with the rich gold light from the moon in the distance created a very mystical effect on the map.

The environment lighting took a fair bit of effort actually. I found the original effect from the default directional light very harsh and made some areas completely invisible in the shadows (which is pretty realistic for how the light on an actual moon would be i suppose) so I added another spotlight and directional light and aimed them in different directions to get a little more visibility in the darker areas.

The result is a pretty nice moonscape, that isn't too dark but not too bright either.

I also picked the default Unity space skybox for this scene. I was going to import a skybox from Unreal Tournament from the Facing Worlds map, but I wasn't sure how to get a hold of it so I settled for this instead.

Overall I'm pretty happy with how this turned out, especially as my first attempt at level design in Unity.