[RELEASED] Affordable Landscapes 2

[Maximum-Dev]

Hello all!

The package is released [Purchase Link]

Affordable Landscapes 2 (here by AL2) is a landscape package that contains a variety of landscapes, 64 Square Kilometers each, designed to address your open world needs. Use AL2 for your projects to save a massive a amount of time and money and instantly get your project recognized among the best looking AAA projects available on the market. We have tried to keep the scales as close to real life as possible as we strive to capture the feelings of vast environments and deliver a true open world experience. Each landscape has a low poly version of itself as a static mesh that can be placed outside the landscape bounds in order to increase the view distance. Everything useful in materials is converted into parameters, in other words, every landscape has a material instance that allows for extensive material customization. There are lots of other cool content and features such as lava pits, particles, nature elements and many really valuable functions that are designed to massively boost the landscape quality. These functions are modular and can be easily used for any other landscapes as well.

Some features
• 64 Square Kilometers of playable space per landscape
• Phenomenal learning source (documentation and commenting)
• Extensive material instances for customization
• Fully heightmap based layer blending
• Proceduraly distributed meshes
• High performance tessellation
• Paintable landscape layers
• Controllabe layer blends
• Many useful functions
• Complementary assets
• Background meshes
• Real world scales
• Real world colors
• Material effects
• PBR Materials
• PBR lighting
• Particles
+Bonus content

The rocks, particles and material effects are added free of charge. We've went ahead and added our Advanced Grass Material package to AL2 free of charge as well. Please read the documentation first so you can get the most out of it. If you're still unsure about making the purchase, again please read the documentation so you'll have a better idea about the content.

Documentation
[Download]

Roadmap
[Board]

Technical Details
PBR: Yes
LODs: Yes
Texture size: 4K
Documentation: Yes
[8] Landscapes
[68] Meshes
[32] Materials
[97] Material Instances
[38] Material Functions
[135] Textures

Images

 

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Overview

 

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Landscape 01

 

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Landscape 02

 

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Landscape 03

 

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Landscape 04

 

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Landscape 05

 

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Landscape 06

 

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Landscape 07

 

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Landscape 08

 

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Advanced Grass Material

 

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Dry Rocks

 

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Lava Rocks

 

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Videos

 

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Scale Comparison

 

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Blue squares represent AL2 while the red squares represent the other other title. If an image is filled with red squares it means AL2 and that title have the same landscape scales.

[Maximum-Dev]

[Merged with OP]
[Post Reserved]

[Aumaan Anubis]

Looks tremendous

What kind of climates and environments do you plan to cover with this pack?

[Maximum-Dev]

Looks tremendous

What kind of climates and environments do you plan to cover with this pack?

Variety is king! We'll see what the tide brings.

[Maximum-Dev]

River Added

[jojo8026]

Holy sh****t!!!!!!

[Maximum-Dev]

Question: Do you need some flat areas along the middle of landscapes or prefer them to be bumpy all around?

[SE_JonF]

I think flat places could help when placing structures and buildings in a scene.

[jwatte]

I think flat places could help when placing structures and buildings in a scene.

I had the same feedback for "infinite" affordable landscapes 1, but it apparently wasn't important enough to focus on.
I'm a big supporter of alternating the "natural" landscapes a little bit to allow for much better gameplay!

[Maximum-Dev]

Thanks for the feedback [MENTION=544]SE_JonF[/MENTION], [MENTION=2525]jwatte[/MENTION].
We'll have some flat-ish areas in the third landscape.

The reason we didn't like to have flat areas in AL1 was mainly that the landscape size wasn't big enough to have a believable amount of both flat areas and the surrounding mountains etc. so we could just let you use the flatten tool in engine and flatten the land where you want. With AL2 the landscape size are 4 times bigger and there's plenty of room to flatten chunks of it.

[Maximum-Dev]

We have decided to do a What's New series as long as this package lives. Every What's New is a projection of a different card on our AL2 Roadmap except, here you will get the full description, images, comparison shots etc. of the feature that's labled as "Done" and we keep you informed and involved with the development.

What's New? - 001

Function - Albedo to Specular

You have often noticed that when looking at landscapes from some angles the reflections are off. Yes you are right. What this function does is it takes your Albedo as input, some calculations happen inside the function and outputs a Specular for you to connect to the Specular pin which also corrects the Fresnel effect for ground surfaces. This is most useful for surfaces such as grass where the default reflection really shows how bad it is. To show this function in effect, here's a couple before and after screenshots. (Island from AL1).


Without Albedo to Specular Function





With Albedo to Specular Function

[Maximum-Dev]

Landscape 03 - WIP
Mirror mirror on the wall...






What's New? - 002

Function - Distance Based Tessellation

Flat surfaces are the worst! POM costs too much, and still looks flat at intersections. Tessellation is even more expensive.. But wait! we have a solution! Affordable Landscapes 2 benefits from a Distance Based Tessellation Function which "let's the users" decide until how far from the player tessellation should be happening. Usually limiting the range to 5-7 meters from the player is the best spot. On top of that it let's to easily choose the tessellation multiplier, soften the transition been tessellated and non tessellated areas. What about the high tessellation base cost? worry no more.. We found the source of the problem and now the way the landscapes are created in AL2 it easily bypass the high tessellation base cost and you are virtually only paying for the amount of triangles you are adding to the landscape within the radius you desire. With that said, let's celebrate using tessellation on landscapes!

Notice the rectangle intersection with ground at near, and far distance:

[Chosker]

What about the high tessellation base cost? worry no more.. We found the source of the problem and now the way the landscapes are created in AL2 it easily bypass the high tessellation base cost and you are virtually only paying for the amount of triangles you are adding to the landscape within the radius you desire.

it's actually great news that there's a workaround. I don't suppose you'd want to share that would you?

[Maximum-Dev]

[MENTION=540]Chosker[/MENTION], Check your PM.

All hail flowing lava!
Flows at different speeds based on vertex colors. Flowing speeds can be customized. Has customizable heat haze. Can be placed using landscape spline tool and tiles seamlessly.

[Necrophob30]

That's some cool looking lava