From Battlegrounds to Fairways: Terrain Procedural Tools in Frostbite

The main game production challenge is more than ever about the artist’s ability to produce a massive amount of quality content. Julien Keable, Team Lead for Frostbite Terrain Tools at Electronic Arts, presents the Frostbite Terrain Procedural Framework, currently used by five EA titles as varied as Battlefield 2042 and EA Sports PGA Tour. With it, world artists create interdependent data layers that drive various aspects of the environment: material selection and its attributes, topology, seamless integration of objects with terrain, object scattering and more. Leveraging Frostbite runtime rendering technology, our tools implement an advanced non-destructive GPU-based layer compositing system with data driven behaviors that let game entities affect terrain. With these automated workflows in the editor, artists iterate faster and save hours of mind-numbing manual steps that can be reinvested where it matters. GDC returns to San Francisco this March 18-22, 2024! For more information, be sure to visit our website and follow the #GDC2024 hashtag on social media. Subscribe to the GDC newsletter and get regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or RSS. Join the GDC mailing list: Follow GDC on Twitter: GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every day. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives.