Environment Art & World Building for Space Engineers 2
For Space Engineers 2, I worked as a Senior Environment Artist and Art Lead, combining hands-on environment art production with responsibility for the project’s visual direction. A major part of my work has been the development of large-scale planetary environments in Houdini and World Creator – from early terrain concepts and heightmaps to terrain features, materials, biome distribution and final playable landscapes.
For the latest Planets Update which was released in December 2025, I worked on the all new planetary content with a particular focus on the Earthlike planet Verdure and Marslike planet Kemik. I was responsible for designing and executing much of the planetary terrain-building pipeline, from the first heightmap sketches through procedural terrain development with Material, Biome and many other internal splat maps that drive placement and distribution of materials and various objects such as foliage, rocks, caves, boulders and other terrain features across the whole planetary surface.
Client: Keen Software House
Role: Senior Environment Artist / Art Lead
Project: Space Engineers 2
Date: August 2021 – 2026
My workflow combines Houdini, World Creator and Substance Designer. In Houdini, I came up with a simple to use system that allowed creating seamless (across their borders) cubemapped 8K heightmaps while still having full control over each individual side of the planet individually. I used Houdini’s fantastic procedural heightfield tools for large-scale landform design, erosion, river carving and terrain layering, keeping the process non-destructive and iteration-friendly.
The resulting heightfields were then refined and art-directed in World Creator, where I shaped landmark silhouettes, coastlines, slopes, canyons and plateaus with attention to gameplay, exploration, player navigation, visual readability and technical constraints. I also used World Creator for defining planetary Biome materials by exporting black and white masks which I then assembled into one global Material Map in Substance Designer.
Environment Art Responsibilities:
Briefly, my work on Space Engineers 2 included:
• Creating global highres seamless cubemap heightmaps for planets
• Designing and sculpting individual large-scale planetary features
• Developing procedural terrain workflows using Houdini and World Creator
• Integrating real world satellite data (iconic places) into heightmap
• Making sure all LODs of models are within pre-defined triangle count limit
• Creating special planetary splat maps to drive distribution of in-game elements
• Creating and maintaining the planetary environment asset pipeline
• Sculpting and distributing terrain features – boulders, overhangs and caves
• Creating modular game-ready environment assets (armors and blocks)
• Creating LODs, optimized assets and collision models for in-game models
• Evaluating environments under in-game lighting and gameplay conditions
• Setting up specific atmosphere settings for the lighting to work correctly
• Working with level designers on gameplay, navigation and visual readability
• Maintaining visual consistency and technical quality across environment content
• Developing production workflows and documentation for the art team
• Mentoring and onboarding artists throughout production
Art Direction & Visual Consistency
Alongside hands-on environment production, I contributed to defining and maintaining the visual direction of Space Engineers 2. I developed comprehensive Art Guide (Art Bible), visual guidelines and production documentation to help artists work within a consistent visual language across environments, hard-surface assets, materials and other game content.
Procedural modeling of Caves
All caves were modelled procedurally in Houdini, exported as OBJ, converted to voxels and then scattered across the whole planetary terrain based on the slope and biome rules. Then (at runtime) they were subtracted (as booleans) from the base voxelized terrain. See the source models below:
This is in a nutshell how I created this Dome-like Stalactites Cave. The whole process largely depends on conversion primitives to VDBs and back to polygons while subtracting one VDB groups from the others using boolean operations. I then just scatter a bunch of points on combined primitve models based on the Normals angle (slope) rule and then spawning pointy cylinders (stalactites) in those points also distorting them by some noises.
In the end I just subtract groups of stalactites VDB group from the Base cave mesh VDB. And that’s how it looks from the inside:
This is another example of triangular cave which I then just duplicate and distort procedurally multiple times to get unique much more complex branching out systems. As you can see I duplicate those straight distorted caves a bunch of times reorienting them in different directions and then just connect them using Convert to VDBs and back to Polygons to create fused and more complex Multi-Level Cave systems.
This is yet another cave model – Funnel Type which is wide in the upper part and gets narrower towards its bottom. The workflow is the same- VDBs, Distort by Noises, Copy to Points, Spawn on Points – rinse and repeat.
Creating Skybox
I was also responsible for creating an HDR skybox that would bring in interesting reflections on the metallic reflective surfaces of the in-game objects, would be cool to observe on its own, yet would not drag too much attention to it – serving as the background for the main action heros – spaceships, space stations, characters, asteroids, explosions and many other things happening in Space Engineers universe.
LODs, Collisions and Triangle Count Limits
Space Engineers is a massive game – there can be hundreds and hundreds of blocks seen and interacting between each other at the same time. So needless to say, that all the models we’ve been creating either as prototypes or as the final production ready models, needed to stay within certain Triangle Count Limits in order to keep gameplay and FPS on a healthy level. We had cool little LOD Triangle Count Calculator – a simple interactive table where we could enter the size of the model we were about to make, and it was giving us the triangle count maximum for each LOD of that model we were not supposed to overshoot while modeling.
Aside from that, all model LODs required accurate collision models which were set up inside VRAGE3 Editor – a proprietary tool for integrating various assets into the game. Initially we were setting them up manually, but luckily as there were a lot of models to set up – coders automated creation of collision models which made our artist lives much easier 🙂
Modularity - you got it!
Oh, speaking of modularity of in-game assets, I can definitely say that I have a huge experience in building modular assets since I started working on the original Space Engineers back in 2015. In Space Engineers universe, all building blocks (models) must be properly modular by being perfectly aligned and contained within specific grid sizes. In Space Engineers 2, so called Unified Grid System was intorduced which allowed creating models in various size variations – 25cm, 50cm and 2.5meter sizes. Which means we had to create our models very carefully making sure all of our models align, visually “click” and function perfectly well when placed side by side in any direction.
Modular Light & Heavy Armors
I was responsible for creating the modular Light and Heavy Armor surfaces used throughout Space Engineers 2. The panel patterns were carefully designed to remain visually seamless and avoid obvious repetition when hundreds of armor blocks were placed side by side, allowing them to cover very large surfaces while still reading as a coherent structure.
Both Light Armor and hardened Heavy Armor used Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM) to add convincing surface depth. Panel gaps, dents, recessed details and protruding elements responded realistically to lighting, giving otherwise flat modular surfaces a much stronger sense of physical depth and material definition.
Credits
All of this wouldn’t be possible without Keen’s Great Team of incredibly talented and passionate Artists, Coders, Designers, QA Testers and many other talented people who contributed their time, skills and passion to make the end product looking as awesome as possible.
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