The Surroundings

There were a couple of reasons why I decided to make this a space map:

• UT99 was known to have many space maps. And that was one important flavor for UT to be UT.

• I hadn’t been making space maps for a long time.

• It was supposed to be less workload.

What should it look like? Initially I had some rough ideas including a giant planet with a ring, like Saturn, and moving stuff. Also at that time, the Kepler Space Telescope mission had discovered several exoplanets, which were very nice references for me.

So the plan was:

• A Saturn-like giant planet, but different from Saturn. Exoplanet references can be useful here.

• Everything should be large enough, so that they look like real space objects, big and far.

• An energy shield around the floating island to “justify“ why there are water, vegetation, and things look just fine in the hazardous space.

The Mesh Work

Open Early version in 2013, the big sphere is the whole sky dome, and the ring and the planet in the middle

Open Final meshes in 2022, optimized ring mesh (the big one), and the planet surface in the middle

The above were screenshots in 3ds Max. The final version of the meshes were done in 2022, since then it was just material work.

The Planet Color - Where The Map Got Its Name

These were the references I used when I started the UT4 version. I liked the pink blue mixture in the left picture but I didn’t want the sunlight to be that warm as that’d be too earth-like. But years later I felt the pink tone was too heavy, and not that related to the name.

The Planet - Kepler 38b

As for the reference of the whole system, initially it was Kepler 22b. But later I found about Kepler 38, a binary star system. It has a giant gas planet Kepler 38b, perfect for what I was making. The nearby small planet, that’s Kepler 38c (well, not based on the one in reality). The in-game map description has more detail about this system and how Liandri put the arena there.

Took me a few days to figure out how to do the sunlight flare. It is not lens flare but a particle based effect.

The Sheer Size of The Planet

These were shot in 2017. The island is about 80 x 85m. The energy shield is 280m in diameter. And the whole planet is 328,500km in diameter, slightly less than the Lunar-Earth distance. For comparison, Saturn has a diameter of 120,536km. Jupiter has 142,984km, and Neptune has 49,528km while Kepler 38b has 55,764km. It’s great UE support such big size meshes, but this scale is not really doable in 3ds Max, so I had to scale the mesh actors 5000 times in UED. But why different from Kepler 38b? Well that was just me being lazy.

The Starfield

I also spent quite some time to make the starfield. I didn’t want those generic static starfield in which stars look like noise spots of the same size and the same color. Instead, I wanted to create a feeling similar to reality. That is, when FOV is wide, like when you use your eyes to see the stars, they are tiny and most of them are dark, but when you zoom in, like using binoculars, they look larger and brighter.

The trick was to make 2 layers of starfield. One is the backdrop sphere mesh which uses a tiling texture of smaller stars of different sizes. That texture has 3 channels of linear color for different star position patterns, and then a noise map to break up the tiling effect. The 2nd layer is a set of instanced meshes for larger stars which even have more details. These meshes are made of individual triangles, each of which is for one star. Then the meshes are instanced for efficient rendering.

There was also the trouble about the ring. It needs to block the visual of the stars behind it but it is translucent material, so I ended up using a mask on the backdrop material, and carefully placed the instanced meshes so that none of those triangles go behind the ring.

The Shield & Anti-gravity

The idea of having a shield to make sense of everything, and block the player from going out, was from the time of the UT3 version. Then it was just how to make it cool. I tried a set of rotating anchors that seemingly interconnected to “spread” the energy on an enclosed “web“. But visually that was too distracting and didn’t look good. Then I tried cable but that was too intrusive. I preferred to have a nice and clean view of the universe.

In an effort to redo the bottom platform I figured there could be a vertical structure that shoots energy beam to an amplifier which creates the shield and its anti-gravity effect, causing the island to float.

The Meshed Ground

The island ground surface is a single mesh. It covers the bottom side, which is another mesh. The edges are blended with PDO.

It was 2019 when I started to rework on the ground mesh which hadn’t been changed much since the UT3 version in 2013. I decided there should be erosion effect.

I used World Machine to generate the flow map and the slope map from the input heightmap. Then did the UV remapping, and put them into Substance Painter to do the compilation, with some manual manipulation. The output mask from SP was then further processed to be converted into one channel of a multi channel map in UE. Also there was the creation of the normal based on the masks. There were trial and error, and it took quite some time to get the final result. It was an approach I regretted about.

There was also the mask painting for the roughness, the moss variation, etc., to get the visual you see in the screenshot.

The bottom side of the island was another story. The mesh and the normal were mostly done a decade ago. I didn’t want to spend time redo all that. Instead the effort was put onto the blending of multiple normal maps and the masks for moss, color variations, roughness etc.

To Be Continued