WIP: Cold Montain

Nope, this doesnt have to do with that film starred by Nicole Kidman. Cold Mountain it’s a Map/Mod project I’ve started working on recently for ARK Let me tell you about it:

As the name suggest, it’s a completelly new zone setted in a snowy mountain populated by albino Dinos (That way they conceal better with their environment

The Landscape is just massive, around 50km2 just like the Island, and it’s using a modified material based on the vanilla one.
Here, have some pics.

cd1a8c951769aeb3135a032fe9014e2feff0c873.jpeg

62fa8459674893c6527182e6bf31d2364dabfdb9.jpeg

68967f540ee1e917f4f3923bcaff194930c162cc.jpeg

3f0a2a20b2449043b059e6c9016dbff85a80b58e.jpeg

Andd…the main terrain is still unfinished. There are still lots of detail I have to paint manually, also I want to take a close look to the material network…make some Low poly mountains Static Mesh to place far in the distance.

Righ now, I’ve carved a couple of lakes (green water eeek!), But I’m feeling they are completelly out of place in this landscape and I should remove and use “snow” as primary water source… no completely decided about this since water is an important element of the game.

That said, I would like to make snowballs as a resource that could be harvested and “eaten” to calm down your thirst but also lowering your temperature. You would be also allowed to combine snowballs with a water recipient to fill it for other purposes.
For foliage, I was planing on using custom snowy trees and bushes, but I’ve digged into the files and found some unused ones…maybe I will use them along some of mine.

And since we are on the mountain and not on an island, Custom weather is also on the table…I would like to make some blizzard storm and maybe a frost-like post-process

Be warned, don’t expect too much from me since I’m still learning and figuring out how to do things :stuck_out_tongue:

Looks good so far keep it up :slight_smile:

Good news for you, I got one thing I can point out that will help you immensely with the Blizzard effect. There is already conveniently one present in the Dev Kit in the form of a Particle Effect :D. You should check it out and see how you could make use of it!

I’m liking the direction this is going in. Have you considered making frozen over lakes? (UE4 has a landscape demo you could use the landscape materials from) In my opinion there is too much land at the moment for the eye to see and it could really benefit from even some unusable water masses.

Wow that’s looking great :slight_smile:

By the way, the green water can be resolved by adding a TrueSkySequenceActor to your map, or a BP Sky Sphere :slight_smile:

Cheers,

There is a little update… I’ve decided to merge the small lakes into a huge frozen lake…it suits more the terrain that way.
The material is the one from the UE4 landscape demo. Maybe I will tweak it somehow because it was made for be seen from very far in the distance.

5aaecec487fd32d4d2c4ebcb0b2e65cfa4bf92c0.jpeg

7796c4ac26ce248baaf738aeba0091ba99f3b650.jpeg

And that’s it for now

Nice use of unreal assets :slight_smile:

i’ve been working on a snow material, very difficult to have a realistic feel to it. but yours look pretty decent already. did you take it from the unreal landscape demo too ?

Well… the snow from the the landscape it’s pretty much simple… Diffuse + Normal, Roughness 0…nothing else…and it looks pretty good.

I’m don’t want to step into complex material effects for now since I want to focus on painting and shaping the landscape before that.

Simple is better then. Thanks !