The Risky-Hirofumi Method:

Creating artistically-driven terrain and shading

  1. First and foremost: Begin with a sketch, plot, or plan of what you are creating. You will not have a meaningful final result otherwise.
  2. Begin in Blender. Break down your sketch into 16m2 chunks. Look for any spots where repetition exists (remember that if you see two chunks that would otherwise be identical besides rotation, that those can be combined into a single chunk later.
  3. In Blender, create a 16m plane. Using proportional edit and a keen eye, model the vertices to match one of your unique chunks derived from the sketch, subdividing as needed.
  1. VITAL: MAKE SURE THE VERTICES ON THE OUTSIDE OF THE CHUNK REMAIN SQUARE. THEY MUST MATCH, AS THEY WILL LOCK TOGETHER
    IF NOT, YOU WILL SEE A CLEAR SEAM IN THE MODEL. NO GOOD.
  1. Repeat 3 as needed until every unique chunk in your sketch is complete. Remember also, this is just terrain. Trees and props will be added later with more granularization.
  2. Now switch to Vertex painting on one of the chunks. Change the colors to be 100% black. Select “Paint”, then hit “Set Vertex Colors”. Black is your base texture. You can decide which texture that will be.
  3. You now have 3 extra textures to paint with. Decide what they are. To use the first, set your color to be 100% Red. Paint the vertices you wish to see that texture in. You can do the same with Green and Blue.
  1. VITAL: COMBINING COLORS WILL RESULT IN MULTIPLE TEXTURES VISIBLE AT ONCE. THIS IS AN UNINTENDED BEHAVIOR AND A SIDE EFFECT OF THE FORMULA. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK
  1. Once you finish this, you can now move to painting the shadows. Switch to edit mode, select all your vertices by hitting A. Open a UV editing window and hit S, then hit 0 (zero). Finally, hit N, and set both values to 0. Now that every vertex has a UV value of 0, you can deselect all verts in the edit window, and individually select the ones you would like to add shading to. Once selected, switch back to the UV window and hit the UV Sync icon (two opposite facing arrows). Set the X value to how much shading you would like to apply.
  2. Repeat as desired.
  3. You are finished. Go back and refine certain elements until you are happy.