Kairidian Spirelands

Sometimes you just have to play around a little. I’ve been doing a lot of tutorials recently, and I’ve been in the middle of moving (so I’m between internet services), so I decided to practice the things I have been learning recently.

Thus the Kairidian Spirelands. This is the first planet in the game I am working on. An excessively arid planet on the surface, it has extensive aquifer networks below ground. This particular region is dotted with spires of stone and the occasional rocky outcropping amongst a sea of sand.

I used the PBR textures I learned about last week and created the rocky outcroppings with the Blender addon ANT Landscape. I also used ANT landscape to make the spires. You can select “Sphere” to have it generate the landscape onto a sphere. I see this working well for asteroids, but I simply stretched the sphere along the z axis for the spires in this scene.

What I Learned

If you duplicate something and want to change the material/shaders, be sure to copy the material. Otherwise, you’ll change the materials on the original object as well.

To set your camera to your current view, hit CTRL + ALT _ NUMPAD0

Here is Blender’s documentation on ANT Landscape.

To add an image as a background, click World Properties (the red globe), click Color and select Image Texture. Then you can choose the image to use. This even works with Dynamic Sky.

The images above contain assets from ambientCG.com, licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal.