https://www.lippykid.com/blog daily 0.75 2026-04-02 https://www.lippykid.com/blog/cell-shaded-explosion-meshes monthly 0.5 2026-04-02 https://www.lippykid.com/blog/project-borealis-fx-clips monthly 0.5 2026-03-31 https://www.lippykid.com/blog/realtime-fx-reel monthly 0.5 2026-03-31 https://www.lippykid.com/blog/art-test-niagara-fx monthly 0.5 2026-02-23 https://www.lippykid.com/blog/ziggy-project-orbital-lemmings-with-niagara monthly 0.5 2026-02-23 https://www.lippykid.com/blog/triffids-project-constrained-niagara-particles monthly 0.5 2026-02-23 https://www.lippykid.com/blog/flak-jack-project-moving-on-thoughts-and-misc-art-dump monthly 0.5 2026-02-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/80dd2b57-54f6-4cea-b123-7dde0a643ecd/HighresScreenshot00004+%282%29.png Blog - Flak Jack project: Moving on, thoughts and misc art dump. - Make it stand out 7th October 2019. I think I was trying a curved Earth here? I love the cloud shadows and sun glints on the river https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/5dab7d05-71d2-48dc-bed7-1a0b905bfbbc/HighresScreenshot00001+%284%29.png Blog - Flak Jack project: Moving on, thoughts and misc art dump. - Make it stand out The game was always about 1 man vs the world, doing the impossible your own way. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/fc3f81de-652d-44bb-8d49-26afc006185b/HighresScreenshot00001+%283%29.jpeg Blog - Flak Jack project: Moving on, thoughts and misc art dump. - Make it stand out Messing with vertex painting no mans land battle damage and trees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/58c5c2ac-34f7-433a-9c3b-127b425da683/mudballs.JPG Blog - Flak Jack project: Moving on, thoughts and misc art dump. - Make it stand out Quixel Mixer mud craters https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/e1c0dfb4-14dd-441e-8f3e-efb5a6d78aaf/Capture2.JPG Blog - Flak Jack project: Moving on, thoughts and misc art dump. - Make it stand out Very, very old tests of geometry based clouds. Before using Truesky and then native UE5 volume clouds. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/42c03f85-f2d8-4562-a5ce-2f57d04f1bc1/imposter_clouds.JPG Blog - Flak Jack project: Moving on, thoughts and misc art dump. - Make it stand out More old clouds, this time imposter sprites https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/299f7b2b-143e-4400-a6da-7c01d481c3f6/HighresScreenshot00000+%286%29.png Blog - Flak Jack project: Moving on, thoughts and misc art dump. - Make it stand out Instanced static mesh buildings. I think the house colors used their world position to look up a gradient ramp for variations? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/ef66c88a-fb6e-4268-9f08-e823eaba9e70/trenchlines.JPG Blog - Flak Jack project: Moving on, thoughts and misc art dump. - Make it stand out I spent a long time working on methods of extracting trench lines from real WW1 trench maps and converting them to geometry. It was a nightmare but these maps are facinating. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/ea55f752-e097-493f-a083-da7447d9a594/HighresScreenshot00000+%2810%29.png Blog - Flak Jack project: Moving on, thoughts and misc art dump. - Make it stand out I was forever testing views like this to try get a sense of the scale https://www.lippykid.com/blog/flak-jack-project-the-great-war-recreating-the-western-front-from-the-air-part-4 monthly 0.5 2026-02-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/cf8a0668-c2a6-4c1a-a5fb-fb8506ac3bef/6d4de37d-3284-4071-9ef8-2e930c08cc88.jpg Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - PART 4 - Make it stand out A tiny tease of substance terrain textures in engine - Colour, roughness and a normal map for each tile. There is also a water mask map that will be used to boost specular. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/81d7cb4b-177b-45aa-864f-2ed00afacff1/ad13742a-eea1-44b6-9ee0-5ea9556e9c8e.jpg Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - PART 4 - Make it stand out Green shapes are building footprints as they are in Open Street Maps. The yellow boxes are the bounding cubes I generate and align to each building after I've generated a rotation value for the building. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/7a5d5f34-d23f-46c2-8517-e7b85e3afeb8/1d68412a-3906-4a84-942c-20f67061f10f.jpg Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - PART 4 - Make it stand out The Unreal Engine blueprint that reads the data tables and spawns each individual building. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/e827e809-965b-424c-8a03-bd3065fff89d/2b37886f-37a1-421b-8104-b0b0a6a2403a.jpg Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - PART 4 - Make it stand out Box Buildings, in engine! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/0d08f16d-2f26-4b0d-a1a3-7d7fd0c9bdf6/badff47f-6ee3-48e8-bd0c-9469cea32a17.jpg Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - PART 4 - Make it stand out Another cluster of towns https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/b0ade42b-97bf-4961-a561-5b9e7dfbe38e/a61e583f-6564-4f44-95e4-16ef44c29133.jpg Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - PART 4 - Make it stand out The view from a higher altitude. This is only showing 2 tiles worth of terrain textures and their buildings. https://www.lippykid.com/blog/flak-jack-project-the-great-war-recreating-the-western-front-from-the-air-part-3 monthly 0.5 2026-02-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/d08a52fb-3624-4c83-8f86-2987ac86bad5/67443007-4581-47cd-9f5e-891b77f2ef39.jpg Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 3 - Make it stand out On the left is a browser view of Open Streep Maps (OSM), which can be downloaded as vectorised data. On the right is Googles satellite view of the same area. It shows the kind of textural detail and complexity I would need to create. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/2783116b-6520-420a-8e33-ffc84f3d05c8/0ef11e1f-4ef8-4500-a2ca-cefb9bb5e2b6.jpg Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 3 - Make it stand out Purple nodes are each loading in an osm data file for each area of the map. The transforms nudge them into alignment with the neigbouring regions. The blue nodes are each a sub-network that reads attribute data on the geometry, and sorts them into groups, and then colour codes each group. Finally each regions outputs are merged back together, and all regions are saved off to disk via the green nodes at the bottom. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/d39e58fe-b14a-4a49-bd95-54d283429a13/ad7e58ed-7684-484c-b5ae-c4facc39a1e2.jpg Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 3 - Make it stand out My Houdini working fle - The red CONTROLS node is my main switch that toggles which tile I'm currently working from (0-64), covering the full 200 km x 200 km area I'm working with. The nodes that follow each cover a particular step in the process, and contain their own graphs inside. There was so much data to crunch and keep organised that trying to be as meticulous as I could was crucial. Each step often required rendering from a particular camera for that step, so the camera nodes on the left correspond with the process on the right. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/2b17bbc2-5253-496d-9a97-9522ca69618c/ecdf2b18-bd3b-4d5d-8fbc-288c8480abfe.jpg Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 3 - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/8b2db0c6-4098-4ebb-a1bf-e080dcefcd58/1d02d7ff-afd7-4433-aa0c-6644393570cc.jpg Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 3 - Make it stand out There is some method to this madness, the two input mask images are loaded in on the left, then they are split into their colour coded components. Most of the complex stuff happens up the top of the graph where the farmland patterns are generated. Each blue box contains the main cluster of nodes to generate the texture for each element, and then the output results for each element are gathered in the green boxes. The 3 diagonal clusters of nodes on the right are where all the elements are merged together for the final output as colour, roughness and normal maps. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/1cedc866-0ac8-4374-a8db-334a60bb7524/e653ccb3-13e3-4241-9ee0-7fde3a79ff72.jpg Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 3 - Make it stand out The usual suspects - as you can see not all the main features come from the OSM data directly. The substance did a bunch of subdivision of fields into smaller fields, and then assigned different criteria to each sub field which defined whether it was planted with crops, or maybe it was plowed dirt, or perhaps it was left natural and wasn't farmland at all. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/7ef8bbb9-c886-4d5a-be3b-858c279b7a4b/7a1f9a36-5b5e-4010-a511-fe057adadc15.jpg Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 3 - Make it stand out Bit by bit, it started to look more like the reference screenshots I gathered from google maps. Getting an exact match was never the goal, instead I was trying to get the right balance of distributions at a macro level https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/16ef8b96-1b84-4d59-9376-662edbc15f3c/631ad94d-03e1-45f3-8f13-c524c0b925f9.png Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 3 - Make it stand out A full tile all together! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/8df745ff-e95f-4d6a-91b3-25102defc19f/9ec6d7d2-83f7-4fea-9a44-6da6486bba94.png Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 3 - Make it stand out A closer look at a smaller area https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/4754d6f8-1498-4232-8c56-da32f5525a07/6e9c7b80-5a22-4b62-a843-07168aaf9dcf.png Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 3 - Make it stand out The real location for comparison - The town of Doullens, north of Amiens, France. https://www.lippykid.com/blog/flak-jack-project-the-great-war-recreating-the-western-front-from-the-air-part-2 monthly 0.5 2026-02-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/09d0aa45-68ac-463f-9cba-a67cefcae03e/98a942a7-0667-413d-9f97-482f3e7df94e.webp Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 2 - Make it stand out Roads, and the 19,000+ "fields" between them https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/11c201f8-f930-4353-a1e3-37f50c1f4483/i1.webp Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 2 - Make it stand out The field "direction" mask. The texture itself probably isnt that useful, but the attribute it represents is used for rotating UV coordinates per polygon https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/5bfe113e-4a0d-48f0-bbad-bc5cfe6a7e4d/i2.webp Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 2 - Make it stand out Roads and Field rotations together https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/77099c85-cff1-497a-baaf-5e473a08c3fb/i3.webp Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 2 - Make it stand out Always work with reference! Here is a small patch taken from Google maps, sized to fit a stretch of the Somme river on my map. It shows a tiny sample of the field complexity I need to create. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/8e1607cf-686d-467b-9b46-ddcca5e32a1b/i4.webp Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 2 - Make it stand out A small snippet of a typical, all be it messy Houdini graph. The blue nodes are switches that randomly pick which chain of the graph above to read in as data flows down the chain. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/4ba80f51-afe1-497a-b5ba-0bfb35968be1/i5.webp Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 2 - Make it stand out field patterns https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/92e37cf1-6e2a-49e0-9d4c-e28dfafdd8f7/i6.webp Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 2 - Make it stand out The first pass of field patterns applied per polygon to another grid https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/4014614d-da06-4f7f-afdb-d206c4923fef/i7.webp Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 2 - Make it stand out A bit of a jumbled mess, but it's promising https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/5aaa62f5-abe8-4e5d-8be0-53e3ea665692/f19cdfb2-a79b-428a-ad51-2a41eabc4143.jpg Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 2 - Make it stand out The google screengrab in the middle almost melts away as it mixes with the surrounding Houdini generated fields. Pretty cool! Still needs some colour tweaks and noises mixed in but it's a good result I think. https://www.lippykid.com/blog/flak-jack-project-the-great-war-recreating-the-western-front-from-the-air-part-1 monthly 0.5 2026-02-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/83d56b6f-d19a-4fd7-b502-3724bc0f9f4a/c6d92c0b-a270-474a-977d-a7a2c2101c38.jpg Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 1 - Make it stand out First attempt - 1024 individual landscape tiles! 1 8k colour map stretched over the entire 200kmx200km terrain. Terrain itself has its height values doubled across the whole terrain to exaggerate the shapes. In the real world it's a very flat area. From this distance, it kinda works but any closer the texture resolution falls apart. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/02c87afa-79a5-4936-bbb5-b99c9c04c0ae/8ee20839-d66a-4cca-a357-5771052229c7.gif Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 1 - Make it stand out Simple processing of the height map in Houdini https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/a8f866c5-6001-45bb-9947-0806fcbb7aa8/4fc653a8-1f48-4e9a-8373-252f2bf6a9fd.jpg Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 1 - Make it stand out This is the full 200kmx200km area. The inner 4 coloured squares are each covered by an 8k texture. The larger more transparent 4 tiles are also covered by 8k textures, but cover 200% more terrain so are effectively 4k. The blue lines in the top left quarter show the landscape tile divisions in UE4 (8x8 = 64 landscape tiles). The rings are distance markers, 100km, 50km, 10km and 1km area. Each colour tinted tile has a material instance applied, so 8 instances in total. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/3252200c-a702-4afe-b236-e4e3f1f320ce/8518632a-fcdd-4d5e-9cf1-4c4e81bfd17c.png Blog - Flak Jack project: The Great War - Recreating the Western Front from the air - Part 1 - Make it stand out Road networks and field types https://www.lippykid.com/blog/flak-jack-project-somme-terrain-progress monthly 0.5 2026-02-22 https://www.lippykid.com/blog/flak-jack-project-the-vintage-aviator monthly 0.5 2026-02-22 https://www.lippykid.com/blog/flak-jack-project-a-long-overdue-update monthly 0.5 2026-02-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/8b7d25d3-c9fb-48ea-ac54-bf8740968cb8/4fc653a8-1f48-4e9a-8373-252f2bf6a9fd.jpg Blog - Flak Jack project: A long overdue update - Make it stand out Some early progress on terrain. 200km square. Real world scale and real roads. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/d0743e48-80f2-4568-b672-3cc5bd9b0d9d/29cb5229-c7a7-438b-ac12-1b24aeb0fcef.png Blog - Flak Jack project: A long overdue update - Make it stand out A very quick test of mixing textures in Megascan Studio. No mans land craters + puddles https://www.lippykid.com/9sakfcb41d0okri6tj72hzlvdy204b daily 0.75 2024-07-26 https://www.lippykid.com/9sakfcb41d0okri6tj72hzlvdy204b/2018/07/22/2018-7-22-the-great-war-recreating-the-western-front-from-the-air-part-4 monthly 0.5 2018-07-22 https://www.lippykid.com/9sakfcb41d0okri6tj72hzlvdy204b/2018/07/15/2017-9-12-the-great-war-recreating-the-western-front-from-the-air-part-3 monthly 0.5 2018-07-15 https://www.lippykid.com/9sakfcb41d0okri6tj72hzlvdy204b/2017/07/10/2017-7-10-the-great-war-recreating-the-western-front-from-the-air-part-2 monthly 0.5 2017-07-10 https://www.lippykid.com/9sakfcb41d0okri6tj72hzlvdy204b/2017/07/05/2017-7-5-the-great-war-recreating-the-western-front-from-the-air-part-1 monthly 0.5 2017-07-05 https://www.lippykid.com/9sakfcb41d0okri6tj72hzlvdy204b/2017/06/25/2017-6-26-somme-terrain-progress monthly 0.5 2017-06-25 https://www.lippykid.com/9sakfcb41d0okri6tj72hzlvdy204b/2017/06/15/2017-6-15-the-vintage-aviator-gallery monthly 0.5 2017-06-15 https://www.lippykid.com/9sakfcb41d0okri6tj72hzlvdy204b/2017/05/31/2017-5-29-a-long-overdue-update monthly 0.5 2017-05-31 https://www.lippykid.com/9sakfcb41d0okri6tj72hzlvdy204b/2016/08/28/2016-8-29-bonnie-snaps-some-visual-references-for-flak-jack monthly 0.5 2016-08-28 https://www.lippykid.com/9sakfcb41d0okri6tj72hzlvdy204b/2016/08/25/2016-8-25-its-nae-a-skirt-the-first-5-months-developing-flak-jack monthly 0.5 2016-08-25 https://www.lippykid.com/9sakfcb41d0okri6tj72hzlvdy204b/category/Uncategorized monthly 0.5 https://www.lippykid.com/about daily 0.75 2026-01-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66a2e4935680f01c7c1f7b05/533467c5-ab33-4f4b-a23e-5387c4270a91/sandyHeadshots.jpg https://www.lippykid.com/reel daily 1.0 2026-01-13