Art-Directed Procedural Terrain Generation in Quixel Mixer
After first successful tests with Quixel Mixer, I wanted to test it for more complex terrains. Specifically I was looking at doing some logo aerials like you'd see in openings or closing credit intros where you fly a camera through a terrain and it eventually reveals a station ID or a facility logo.
The Clarisse scene has a very simple setup:
- A single 4 polygon ground-plane, tessellated with a displacement shader component.
- Trees are scattered following the masked green areas from the texture.
- River fog is a mix of a volume box and scattered VDB clouds
- The large clouds are from the Walt Disney Animation Studios Cloud Data Set and used in various complexities depending on their screen-size and distance to camera
Frame 01 - Daybreak over Valley of J's Descender
Frame 02 - Sunrise over O's peak. The first eagles soar from the treetops.
Frame 03 - The cold night rivers warm up to the first sunlight. The eagles are in full breakfast mode.
Frame 04 - The woodlands of the outer lakes wake up to a misty morning.
Frame 05 - The Lone Mountain folk, still asleep high atop the range.
Frame 06 - Time to leave for the clouds and take it all in.
Frame 07 - Cloud's Reach from… well from very high above.
Frame 08 - Oh hell, a commercial.
Comparison of frames to locations / views in Quixel Mixer screenshots
Quixel Mixer screen-recording first test (4K texture)
It's not procedural unless you do it with the Artstation logo.