Special thanks to Steffen Hampel for his feedback, Film Composite for the plate, Gaëlle Seguillon for the lava photopack and all the artist at DICE that made the beautiful game that is Star Wars Battlefront.

The environment is inspired by Lah'mu, the icelandic planet at the beginning of Rogue One.

For the landscape I chose this plate, a 4k video I found on Pexels provided for free by Film Composite
(https://www.pexels.com/fr-fr/video/islande-montagnes-soleil-couchant-aerien-16296843/)

From this video I was able to track a camera in Nuke and do a photogrammetry in Reality Capture of the mountain which would come in handy for scene assembly, contact shadows, bounce light and masking.

Due to the nature of the landscape, a classic imperial base design wouldn't cut it. Furthermore, I wanted a more industrial look with antennas and pipelines running down the mountain similar to the Sullust maps of Battlefront 2015.

I eventually decided to go for a "dam" look with a landing platform taking advantage of the spires.

The modelling was a mix of custom made assets and kitbashing.
For the kitbashing, I used Frosty Editor to extract assets from Star Wars Battlefront. I had a blast reverse engineering all the channel packing and material blending, I learned a lot.

For custom assets if It was Hero I would hand paint the textures in photoshop (like the OGs)

I also made a collection of generic greeblies textures using midjourney and made them seamless.

Using Substance 3d Sampler (formerly substance alchemist) you can generate normal and roughness information. It was good enough for the distance tbh.

The lava was made in matte painting in acesCCT using LUTs, I used Gaëlle Seguillon's Lava Lake Pack as a main source (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/OoA4Lb)

I initially thought I would need more than one projection considering the rather extreme landscape and camera movement, but it proved not to be necessary with enough resolution.

I wanted to try EmberGen for a long time and the chimney smoke was the perfect opportunity. The two chimneys are just one animation with a time offset. I also rendered some volumetrics for the fog in the valley.