Icarus: Dangerous Horizons - Heightmap Creation

For Dangerous Horizons, the second major DLC for Icarus, I was responsible for the initial heightmap creation, working closely with Design, Concept Art and World-Building teams. We wanted to take advantage of Houdini's landscape tools to build something as realistic as possible while also meeting game design requirements:
- Regions needed to have differing heights relative to each other to make traversal interesting, ie: arctic regions being higher than the swamp.
- We use post processing volumes for biome lighting, which meant needing to tightly control the transition corridors.
- Avoiding overly long sight lines for performance.
- Long, steep slopes aren't ideal for gameplay, not least because it makes base building more complicated, therefore most of these areas are terraced and dressed with cliff meshes.

It was a lot of fun and a privilege to be responsible for Elysium's landscape and collaborate with the other teams to bring it to life. There was ultimately some changes done as the map took shape, but I was very pleased with how much we were able to maintain from original vision to final polish.
Special thanks to Cam Crawford for the concept and design.