I started this project with the intention to create a large-scale explorable environment as a passion project and as a chance to pick up some new skills and practice existing ones.
My first step was to create a very rough whitebox plan in blender in order to gain a rough idea of the layout of the explorable area I wanted to create. This quickly became standard for any projects of this scale that I work on. Once I had a model I liked, I then exported it into Unity to use as a base.
Once in Unity, I then created some terrain and sculpted it to match my whitebox. From there I created a list of textures and models I would need and begin with them, starting with the grass and rocks. Due to the large scale of the environment and the level of detail I wanted, special attention was given to creating poly-efficent LOD's, or level-of-detail models.
After creating the base layout of the scene and adding the first pass of detail, I began to solidify certain set pieces in the environment and work on adding extra effects, such as atmospheric particle effects and post processing.
Once I had all my major models in place and the large-scale art passes were finished, I turned to the small-scale details such as foliage or ground level rocks to finish out the scene. Overall, this project has proven to be a create learning opportunity. I intend to create more large-scale projects like this in the future.
