I haven't updated my blog in a while but, now that I have a few moments to spare, I think I should. I recently had to hand-in a piece of work relating to the theme of time and space. To that end, I decided to do some terrain sculpting using Terragen and a few other tools I've collected over the years. I have a hard time leaving things alone and so I spent about 3-4 hours alone on trying to get the colours just right. I used samples from a variety of seasonal photos to get the desired look and feel.

Until Unity allows more than diffuse maps for the terrain shader, it will always be difficult to make good looking snow. Specular/bump maps would have allowed for glistening in the sun and made it appear less flat. I tried to combat this via the use of particle emitters for snow being blown downhill (Modern Warfare 2 uses the same technique), 'volumetric' light and fog. Summer uses an atmospheric engine and not a skybox, it's an altered version of a script I found on the Unity forums last year (more on this in a later post). The grass is factored into the real-time AO and, while it incurs a massive performance hit, looks great.

I might write a tutorial on this in the near future as it's something a lot of people have been asking me for.