Entry 4 - Creating of Сanyon

At one point in the game, the hero travels through the canyon. Creating procedural generation of cliffs of the canyon turned out to be quite an interesting task.

First, I sculpted a shape from clay. It took more than 10 kilograms of sculptural clay. I tried to convey the layered structure of the Grand Canyon. It was decided to make only three layers. I looked a lot of photos of the canyon and highlighted some interesting references.

At the next step I scanned the resulting model using photogrammetry. For this, I took 88 photos of the canyon from different angles. The resulting model has 3,000,000 polygons.

Then, from a 3D model, a height map was formed, which I cut into many small sections. When the game generates a canyon, it takes these sections, mixes them in random order and lays out them along the previously generated spline to form a height map of a cliff.

Unfortunately, the map in the game has a resolution of 0.5 meters per cell and cannot represent all the details of the original model, however, the result still looks good, and the creation process was very fun.