I never thought I'd become an environmental artist.

But when you’re wearing all the hats of a one-man act, there isn’t a whole lot of choice.

And so, for the time being, I am an environmental artist.

And I must say, I’m enjoying it.

Let me start by talking about my tools. From there, I’ll explain my pipeline.

There are a lot of great tools for environmental artists on the Unity Marketplace now. Procedural generation and placement tools that remove a lot of the tedium cost a few hundred dollars. I was lucky enough to get some of these at significant discounts in various bundles and sales.

First up is Gaia from Procedural Worlds. This is a great tool that I’ve had for some time, spent several days worth of time working with, and I have yet to scratch past the first few layers of its capabilities.

Next is Enviro, a procedural sky and lighting system. It also has a full-featured weather system. It plays nicely with Gaia, which makes me happy. Plus, it just looks gorgeous.

Completing the look of the terrain is Microsplat, a terrain shader with a lot of fiddly bits that not only make terrains look great, but also give you a nice performance boost.

So far I’ve only been setting the base here with the terrain. Vegetation is there, but it’s set up automatically by Gaia, and is not exactly what I want. But I’ll get into that part of the workflow in a future post.

Now, let’s talk about the pipeline and how we get to this state.

Using these tools is definitely a much easier nicer workflow that Unity’s stock Terrain tools, but it’s still not a walk in the park. Plus, at this stage of the game, we have three assets from three different creators, so there’s some adjustments that need to be made to get those three cooperating nicely.

The process follows three basic steps:

• Create a terrain in Gaia

• Apply Microsplat material to that terrain

• Set up Enviro lighting and hook it up with Gaia and Microsplat

Step 1: Gaia - Procedural Worlds have been working for many years making this tool designer friendly. It’s almost “press button - make game” at this point. They give you the option to randomly generate an entire terrain, but you can also manually use the stamper to create your own look. For this particular scene, I’ve used the world generator, and gone with the island in the middle of the ocean look. Once the terrain is created, it’s a simple thing to go into the Scene, and in the “Gaia Tools” object that Gaia creates for you open the Sample Biome and spawn the terrain splat maps and vegetation. Gaia even gives you preview camera settings with different options such as fly-cam, 1st person or 3rd person.

Step 2: Microsplat - Unity’s stock terrain, when combined with Gaia’s procedural texturing is decent, but Microsplat just adds so much more. The base asset is free, and it gives you many more texture slots to apply but also improves performance. Jason Booth, the creator adds a whole suite of add-on packs at extra cost that give you additional features to make your terrain pop just that much more.

I’ve got these add-ons applied now:

• Anti-Tiling - adds extra noise to the textures to break up repetitive blocks

• Tesselation & Parallax - adds some extra processing to the terrain mesh to give it more detail when viewed up close. This gives some nice shaggy look to the grass textures, and more ruggedness to the rocky areas.

Process is really simple. Gaia puts the terrain object in it’s own manager object, so find that in the scene and add the Microsplat component. Hit the button, and Microsplat reads the textures off the terrain, and builds this into its own material which is then applies to the terrain. Open up the material in the Inspector to toggle on any installed add-ons and tweak the settings to make it look how you want.

Step 3: Enviro - Ask any gamedev what makes a game pop, and they will almost always tell you “lighting”.

Enviro sets up a skybox with dynamic lighting, and adds a day/night cycle, clouds and weather. And best of all, it just works. All the settings are on the Enviro object in the scene, and other packages such as Gaia and Microsplat have integrations with it.

For Gaia integration, there’s the Gaia Runtime object in the scene that has an option for “Third Party” lighting. Once that’s set, and the Enviro object referenced in Gaia’s lighting module, Gaia will disable all other lights for you automatically. One issue is that the water system requires a bit of manual work on the reflections to properly update when Enviro goes into “night mode”, but other than that it’s pretty turn-key.

For Microsplat support, the integration direction is the other way. On the Enviro system there’s an integration section, and it’s just a matter of clicking the “Add Microsplat Support” button. The most obvious advantage of this is support for the weather system; when Enviro starts raining, Microsplat will add some shininess to the terrain to make the ground look wet. This requires the Streams add-on for Microsplat, but it is worth it. I need to play around with the settings on this a bit, and right now I’m working with the old Built In shader, rather than URP. The URP version of this looks much better, but I’ve been having issues with vegetation and URP, so I’ve gone back to Built-In. More on that later.

I’ve glossed over a lot of details here. It may seem like these tools do all the work for you. While they will do a lot of the heavy lifting, it’s important to note that I've spent a few work-days worth of time learning not just how the tools work, but also how to adjust the parameters to get the look that I want. Plus there’s the integration of the different components.

I can’t call my self a “master” in this field just yet, only a “talented amateur”. And there’s a deep hole to dig into to get to that master title. But I’m having a great time digging.

Next up is adding vegetation and other “set dressing” to give this scene some life.

Stay tuned!

I never thought I'd become an environmental artist.

But when you’re wearing all the hats of a one-man act, there isn’t a whole lot of choice.

And so, for the time being, I am an environmental artist.

And I must say, I’m enjoying it.

Let me start by talking about my tools. From there, I’ll explain my pipeline.

There are a lot of great tools for environmental artists on the Unity Marketplace now. Procedural generation and placement tools that remove a lot of the tedium cost a few hundred dollars. I was lucky enough to get some of these at significant discounts in various bundles and sales.

First up is Gaia from Procedural Worlds. This is a great tool that I’ve had for some time, spent several days worth of time working with, and I have yet to scratch past the first few layers of its capabilities.

Next is Enviro, a procedural sky and lighting system. It also has a full-featured weather system. It plays nicely with Gaia, which makes me happy. Plus, it just looks gorgeous.

Completing the look of the terrain is Microsplat, a terrain shader with a lot of fiddly bits that not only make terrains look great, but also give you a nice performance boost.

So far I’ve only been setting the base here with the terrain. Vegetation is there, but it’s set up automatically by Gaia, and is not exactly what I want. But I’ll get into that part of the workflow in a future post.

Now, let’s talk about the pipeline and how we get to this state.

Using these tools is definitely a much easier nicer workflow that Unity’s stock Terrain tools, but it’s still not a walk in the park. Plus, at this stage of the game, we have three assets from three different creators, so there’s some adjustments that need to be made to get those three cooperating nicely.

The process follows three basic steps:

• Create a terrain in Gaia

• Apply Microsplat material to that terrain

• Set up Enviro lighting and hook it up with Gaia and Microsplat

Step 1: Gaia - Procedural Worlds have been working for many years making this tool designer friendly. It’s almost “press button - make game” at this point. They give you the option to randomly generate an entire terrain, but you can also manually use the stamper to create your own look. For this particular scene, I’ve used the world generator, and gone with the island in the middle of the ocean look. Once the terrain is created, it’s a simple thing to go into the Scene, and in the “Gaia Tools” object that Gaia creates for you open the Sample Biome and spawn the terrain splat maps and vegetation. Gaia even gives you preview camera settings with different options such as fly-cam, 1st person or 3rd person.

Step 2: Microsplat - Unity’s stock terrain, when combined with Gaia’s procedural texturing is decent, but Microsplat just adds so much more. The base asset is free, and it gives you many more texture slots to apply but also improves performance. Jason Booth, the creator adds a whole suite of add-on packs at extra cost that give you additional features to make your terrain pop just that much more.

I’ve got these add-ons applied now:

• Anti-Tiling - adds extra noise to the textures to break up repetitive blocks

• Tesselation & Parallax - adds some extra processing to the terrain mesh to give it more detail when viewed up close. This gives some nice shaggy look to the grass textures, and more ruggedness to the rocky areas.

Process is really simple. Gaia puts the terrain object in it’s own manager object, so find that in the scene and add the Microsplat component. Hit the button, and Microsplat reads the textures off the terrain, and builds this into its own material which is then applies to the terrain. Open up the material in the Inspector to toggle on any installed add-ons and tweak the settings to make it look how you want.

Step 3: Enviro - Ask any gamedev what makes a game pop, and they will almost always tell you “lighting”.

Enviro sets up a skybox with dynamic lighting, and adds a day/night cycle, clouds and weather. And best of all, it just works. All the settings are on the Enviro object in the scene, and other packages such as Gaia and Microsplat have integrations with it.

For Gaia integration, there’s the Gaia Runtime object in the scene that has an option for “Third Party” lighting. Once that’s set, and the Enviro object referenced in Gaia’s lighting module, Gaia will disable all other lights for you automatically. One issue is that the water system requires a bit of manual work on the reflections to properly update when Enviro goes into “night mode”, but other than that it’s pretty turn-key.

For Microsplat support, the integration direction is the other way. On the Enviro system there’s an integration section, and it’s just a matter of clicking the “Add Microsplat Support” button. The most obvious advantage of this is support for the weather system; when Enviro starts raining, Microsplat will add some shininess to the terrain to make the ground look wet. This requires the Streams add-on for Microsplat, but it is worth it. I need to play around with the settings on this a bit, and right now I’m working with the old Built In shader, rather than URP. The URP version of this looks much better, but I’ve been having issues with vegetation and URP, so I’ve gone back to Built-In. More on that later.

I’ve glossed over a lot of details here. It may seem like these tools do all the work for you. While they will do a lot of the heavy lifting, it’s important to note that I've spent a few work-days worth of time learning not just how the tools work, but also how to adjust the parameters to get the look that I want. Plus there’s the integration of the different components.

I can’t call my self a “master” in this field just yet, only a “talented amateur”. And there’s a deep hole to dig into to get to that master title. But I’m having a great time digging.

Next up is adding vegetation and other “set dressing” to give this scene some life.

Stay tuned!