Making the cliff in Desert Angels

The biggest model that I created for Desert Angels was the cliff that serves as the climactic setpiece of Act I, which has a ‘switchback’ path carving up the mountain, and several cutscenes that can be viewed on the route to the top.

The process of this asset was, roughly:

1. Shape the basic shape using terrain tools in Unity

I used Microverse as my main tool of choice, and started with a handful of free terrain heightmaps. The end result was then exported as a bitmap from within Unity, which can be done from default terrain tools.

2. Export the terrain to a PNG map, then import it as a heightmap in Blender

This is done as a Displace modifier on a large subdivided plane with the heightmap PNG as the input.

3. Use boolean operations to cut off the top and make a flat surface for the top

4. Use sculpting tools to shape the mountain into a form that makes sense for the game (mostly flattening the back so tha I could fit it against the desert terrain.)

Also done in Blender. I don’t have images here because I did not save any process shots of doing this…

5. Create the road and stitch it back to the rest of the mountain

I followed the process in this video, starting with a curve and then using manual vertex manipulation to splice the road back onto the mountain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq1Dnp1kpxI

6. Simplify the topography of the road to ensure that the entire thing is walkable.

Desert Angels relies on face slopes to determine walkable surfaces, so this was an embarrassingly manual process of ensuring all the faces are triangles and that they’re ‘flat’ enough to be marked walkable ingame.

Other notes

• The first version of the mountain had a flat color for the whole thing, and lots of playtesters could not find the path upwards. So I added a new texture that adds a subtle gradient to the desired path to draw attention to it.
• Even though the game had a lot of logic in place to automatically detect ‘walkable’ areas via face slopes, it was impossible to directly mark every walkable surface without allowing people to walk around ‘invalid’ areas. So the final version in game also has a bunch of invisible walls around the path.