The Alters: Last Variable DLC used Nanite cutout foliage and a global HISM system

In an interview with 80 Level, Artem Ostapchuk, a senior 3D environment artist at 11 bit studios, explained how the team filled the levels of The Alters: Last Variable with alien vegetation. Every level had to work in two states: the original scorched planet and a fully terraformed, overgrown version.

For foliage, the team used only opaque Nanite meshes. Every small leaf and grass blade is real cutout geometry with no transparency. Ostapchuk said this beat traditional masked shaders in their benchmarks. Some assets also use subtle World Position Offset wind animation driven by vertex color channels. For landscape, the team stayed with VHM/RVT rather than Nanite landscape, as in the original game.

The team did not use the Houdini Engine/Live Link bridge in Unreal. Instead, Ostapchuk built in-engine tools: PCG mesh scattering, geometry-script moss generation and trace-based scattering. The team also made heavy use of level instances. Modeling and sculpting used Blender and ZBrush, with Substance 3D Designer and Painter for texturing. SpeedTree and Houdini were used for some tasks, and Ostapchuk also used geometry nodes in Blender for spline- and weight-based mesh spawning.

Heavy use of Blueprint prefabs and Packed Level Actors left the levels with many separate HISM (hierarchical instanced static mesh) components spread across actors. Engine programmers Radosław Choma and Bartek Lipiński built a system that consolidates instances into a single global HISM per mesh type across the level and also handles packed level actors. Ostapchuk's one caveat: do not create packed levels from actors with non-uniform scale if they have collision.

The main challenges he cited were keeping every vista, path and tunnel readable in both level states, and leaving enough room for new DLC mechanics and player-placed buildings without crowding the environment. His advice for other teams is to learn engine limits before building assets, invest early in small in-engine tools, and build assets and shaders flexibly because plans change. The full interview on 80 Level includes his reference and learning recommendations.