Stylized Environment

Recipe for a painterly outdoor scene — triplanar-mapped terrain, wind-animated foliage, height-gradient cliff rocks, and the Stylized Fog module pulling it all into a depth-friendly silhouette. This combines four Genesis features into one cohesive look.

What you’ll build

A stylized forest with a triplanar rock cliff, wind-swaying grass and trees, a height gradient from moss to stone, and a stylized fog distance fade.

Video

The finished painterly forest scene: a triplanar cliff, wind-animated grass and trees, the moss-to-rock height gradient, and stylized fog fading into distance under a low sunset light.

how-to/stylized-environment/result.mp4

The completed stylized forest scene this recipe builds.

Requirements

Terrain or large mesh (a sculpted cliff works).
Foliage cards or low-poly trees.
Two albedo / normal sets: grass and rock.
Stylized Fog module installed (see Stylized Fog).

Steps

1. Terrain material with triplanar

Create a Genesis material in Lit mode. Maps foldout → toggle Triplanar on. Assign rock textures to the base slot and grass to the layer slot. The cliff now reads seamlessly across vertical and horizontal faces with no UV stretching.

2. Height gradient blend

Advanced → Height Gradient. Set Bottom Color = mossy green, Top Color = bare rock. World-Y drives the blend. Grass tints the bottom of the cliff, rock dominates the top.

Rock and grass at uniform intensity across the cliff.

Grass at base, rock at top, soft transition.

Flat triplanar

Height gradient

The cliff before and after the height gradient. Drag to compare.

3. Foliage cards with vertex wind

For grass cards: new Genesis material, Unlit mode (foliage rarely needs lighting). Animation → Vertex Animation → Wind. Strength 0.3, Speed 1.5.

4. Trees with cel + wind

Trees: Genesis Toon mode, Cel Stepped(3), Vertex Animation Wave. Mask the wave by vertex color R so the trunk stays still and only branches move.


// Force trunk to ignore wind via vertex color in the mesh
// Then in the material:
material.SetFloat("_VertexAnimMaskChannel", 0); // R

5. Stylized Fog

Open your URP renderer and confirm the Stylized Fog renderer feature is added. In the volume, drop a fog profile: warm-to-cool gradient, height-based falloff, distance fade-out at 80m.

6. Tie it together

Drop a directional light angled low (sunset). Bake lighting on static meshes. Use the PCSS Shadow module for soft cliff shadows.

Triplanar plus three layer textures plus stochastic sampling is 9+ samples per fragment. Use it on the hero cliff, not on every rock — distant rocks get the cheap single-UV material.

Variations

Desert: swap mossy green for sand yellow in the height gradient, dial down wind.
Snow: top color pure white, world-Y bias high, add a glitter detail map.
Underwater: enable Refraction on the water material, set Stylized Fog to deep blue.