Mapping a Beach

Beaches are made by Water (usually the ocean) eroding cliffs, or soil banks, or even erosion of river beds, over time. the erosion causes granules of eroded stone to gather, leading to either sandy or pebbley areas.

so, by that logic, a beach requires 3 things, a water source (in this case the ocean), and source of material (in this case cliffs) and either sand or pebbles (or a mix of course, but in this case sand).

Often in games real geography is ignored in favour of smoother gameplay. and of course, like all good games designers, i chose gameplay over geographical correctness. my beach is made out of the unreal engines standard terrain editor, with a large body of water (which causes FPS problems), and some static meshes to for cliffs and collections of rocks.

My Terrain has no Deco Layers, and only has layers of texture for sand, sparse mossy stone, and stone. the mossy stone is for colour, the stone is for bedrock and the sand is for...well...sand.

The cliffs and stones are actually the same static mesh, showing the versatility of scaling and orientation.

The challenge in this level is going to be to find a number of pickups, so i decided to build a chamber under the terrain, simple to make the task a little more entertaining. the chamber consists of a simple room, and creating an opening in the terrain simply means making certain poly's of the terrain invisible. the problem with this technique is that the poly's of a terrain can take up more space than the entrance you are trying to erase, so i patched the holes with various stone static meshes.