Took a little break to spend time with the girlfriend and family. Now I'm back on this project for about three hours(ish) a day. I switched over to generating the background terrain for the scene. The inspiration was the High Sierra's here in California. I've hiked them multiple times, so I thought I would add them in.
I went a bit more lower on the snow, like it's just starting to melt, so you get all this criss crossing snow melt, and even the color of the soil is different. I would say I went to 80% accuracy of the reference images, because whats the fun if you can't exaggerate some rock formations here and there.
The actual height information is pretty easy to create. Just adjust some perlin noise generators, and then run them through erosion filters. The key to get believable rocks is through Rock hardness and soil flow. Water and snow break down rock in different ways, so don't just put one erosion filter on you generators. Here I had two filters, one for the soil carry in the valley, and the other for the jagged mountain peaks.
The rest of the graph is creating your texture height maps for UE4. It's mostly grabbing the height, slope, and erosion carry masks and blending them together in a believable way. If you would like me to create a more in depth tutorial on some World Machine techniques, let me know!
