This project was mainly inspired by the same landmark in the game Humankind. I saw it and thought it would be an interesting thing to try and recreate in Civilization VI’s art style.

I started by gathering reference material. In this case, I actually went ahead and used Google Earth (which displays a 3D model of the buttes) to do some photogrammetry with Substance Sampler.

I used the scanned models a reference for planning the final layout of the wonder. I scaled the individual buttes up to better fit the three hexagonal tiles I allotted to them. They appear significantly closer to each other than in real life as a result: but making the landmark feel ‘monumental’ was a big priority of mine on this project.

I separated the actual buttes from their bases. I wanted the buttes to be standalone meshes, but the bases would use heightmaps to modify and better blend with the game’s terrain system. The scanned models gave me a helpful base to work off. But I did have to rework them to make it fit with Civilization VI’s more stylized art style. This involved a lot of sculpting to emphasize planes and forms. The scanned mesh didn’t have a lot of mesh detail, so much had to be manually added in.

The models were baked down to low-poly meshes (created using decimation tools in Zbrush and manually refined in Blender) and then textured in Substance Painter.

The bases were baked down as a height map, then run through Substance Designer to generate the albedo and other maps for use in the game.

As a final finishing touch, I drew some blackbrush branches in Procreate, (generating the normal and roughness maps from that drawing in Substance Designer) and made a couple of bushes to populate the center of the landmark (it was looking a little empty) and to balance the vibrant red color of the buttes.