Burning lands: Khe Sanh – Part 2

Welcome back, you can now set a reminder for when we go live on Kickstarter by clicking the link here.

In part 2 of the development of Khe Sanh, in this article we will be showing off the detailing also know as set dressing, as well as a goodie.

Over the last couple of months, we’ve made a big effort to push the quality of Khe Sanh’s environment art to a higher level, developing shaders and workflow’s to easily add dirt and grunge onto most of our art assets. This allows us to have high quality and very performant tiling base textures shared across multiple assets while still having the benefit of world relevant details (dirt gathering on top of objects, grunge and wetness seeping up from the bottom etc.) that ground the models into the scene and help us achieve that dust covered Khe Sanh vibe.

BEFORE

AFTER

We’ve also leveraged Unreal’s Runtime Virtual Texturing and Virtual Heightfield Mesh technologies to make sure rocks, roads, dirt mounds and other objects blend seamlessly with a highly detailed and bumpy terrain. One huge benefit of this new system is that unlike traditional tessellation techniques, all the little bumps and lumps of mud and rock in the terrain even cast realtime dynamic shadows which really make the landscape come to life when the light’s at a low angle.

Set Dressing

Secondary vehicle entrance.

Medical tents, located in the middle of the airfield.

Barracks and accommodation along the main road in side the airfield

Main gate entrance to the airfield can be seen on the far right of the image, giving you an idea of scale.

Here is the main gate entrance to the airfield, with helipads and barracks located on the far right.

Helipads located at the front of the airfield.

Main road through the airfield littered with more barracks and accommodation

Traffic control tower can be seen in the distance surrounded by barracks and tents.

Traffic control tower

A series of tents sit by the airfield at the top of the runway.

A battery of 105mm Howitzers positioned at the front of the airbase

Additional battery of 105mm Howitzers at the end of the airfield.

The post office located inside the airfield.

Ariel view of the airfield.

Vehicles

The M48 Patton is an American first generation main battle tank (MBT)

See you all very soon, with a big surprise!