How to create Clash of Clans-like terrain?

Hello,
I’m building a small 3D race mobile game with a fixed top-down camera position.
I created the track itself in blender, for the rest I used a plane with a grass texture. But it looks really poor.
7499372--923786--my.jpg

It would be awesome to create something like this in Clash of Clans

7499372--923792--ex2.jpg

In Clash of Clans the scenario is 2D, so its just a “photo” of a 3D terrain I think.
I could do it too, like making a screenshot from within a game, with a nice terrain builder like Farming Simulator or whatsover :slight_smile:

But I need more, since my game is in 3D -I would also need a normal map, gloss map for wet dirt etc. to get more depth & nice light effects.
What I don’t want is multiple materials, real 3D grass etc. so it can still run fast on mobile devices. Only bigger objects like trees or bushes should be made in 3D.

I found a software called “World-Creator”, which is very expensive (200-300€), but it seems you can create something like a normal map etc. for your terrain.
I mean I would afford it for myself, but it looks very realistic then I guess… Does someone knows a way to create terrain which looks similar to CoC? Or is it also possible with World-Creator? I would like to give it a try, but they don’t offer a trial period :eyes:

Sounds like you want a splatmap shader, similar to Unity’s terrain shader?

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Hello kdgalla, thanks for your reply! I read about it a bit, but I think its more for bigger scenes?

What I actual want is just 1 texture/material for all of my terrain.
Because the terrain is not big, it fits to the screen of a mobile device. The camera is also fix to one position.
And it should be 2D. So just a plane, not a 3D mesh.

Like this real photo of a field:

But this photo would miss a normal map & gloss map.
So I need some kind of tool with which I can create a terrain with some grass/sand/dirt and export all necessary textures out of it (color map, normal map, gloss map).

I “hope” with this, the terrain could look really good, with very low gpu/cpu costs because its 2D, but still have a kind of 3D’ish look (could react better to light, throwing some shadows etc. because of normal map)

If your viewpoint is fixed, than there’s no real reason to have normal maps or gloss maps, unless there are moving light sources.

Exactly, but thats what I plan to have. The cars should have dynamic lights. Maybe also some static lights in the scene, for which I would need to bake them. But even for this process I would need more information about the “terrain”.

Just to answer my own opening question:

Supercell, the maker of Clash of Clans did a contest, where creators could create a scenery for Halloween.
They also hinted a bit into a direction, which tools you could use: here.

The winner was then Naji Kadalayi, who seemed to use the tool Substance Painter, besides some other tools.
After some research it seems like its exactly what I was searching for: Video
So you can “paint” with different materials, which have different characteristics and at the end, you can combine all of those into one texture: Video

Downside is, it costs some money (~20€/month), which is still ok I think. But it seems you can do similar things also in blender and also some other tools… but Substance Painter seems to be the “easier”/“faster” one.
Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Maybe you can try Quixel Mixer? :stuck_out_tongue:
It is free and you can paint materials, too.

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Thanks lilacsky824 for sharing, that tool looks perfect :slight_smile: