In this environment I have built a mountainous region that utilizes a procedural auto landscape material to generate different materials onto the landscape based on the slope of the terrain. I also created a deformable snow material that reacts to the player character mesh’s collision. Lastly, I added two particle systems, one so the character in the level would give the appearance that they’re kicking up snow as they walk and the other to create the appearance of snowfall.

This project allowed me to venture into creating more technical aspects of level design. I was able to refine a particle effect that emits snowfall to add to the tone and realism of the environment. I also was able to experiment and learn automatic landscaping materials in UE4 to create a dynamic landscape. This landscape uses the material and projects either a rock/mountainous texture or a snow covered texture on the terrain based off of its slope. I also created a material with dynamic tessellation to give the effect of snow being disturbed as the character moves through it. 

Creating this environment took a lot of focus to achieve the right look as the material changed across the slope of the landscape. Through feedback from my previous course that I had created it in, I was challenged to combine the two materials to create one unique dynamic landscape because I had made them separately to fully grasp both processes. The challenge that came from this was finding the correct way to combine the materials and maintain the collision dynamics that made the snow tessellation work correctly. In the end, combining the two materials with the addition of the snowfall particle effect has created a truly dynamic environment.