How to Set Up a Frozen Level

 

Overview

The following walkthrough gives you an overview of how to build a frozen level. 

You can also open level ice.cry from the original Crysis levels as a base to build your frozen level, this way you don’t need to import all the frozen materials and settings described in this document. 

 

Setting correct lighting for frozen scenes

 

Open the Time of Day view pane (View/Open View Pane/Time Of Day) and using the Import From File task located on the left of the pane, import this time of day settings (frozen.tod) or set sun, fog and sky color settings to about 243,000,000, 188,000,000 and 115,000,000 respectively as shown in the following screenshot: 

Doing so will give your level a good base lighting avoiding over brightening. 

Making Vegetation frozen

Set the Layer Frozen Property to True in the Vegetation parameters (located in the Terrain section of the *RollupBar*): 

Making objects frozen

Select any Object or Prefab and in the Material Layers section of the RollupBar set the Frozen property to True. 

Adding frozen roads

Assign one of the frozen materials to your road entity (for example materials/terrain/roads/road_concrete_with_stripes_frozen.mtl) 

Choosing frozen ground materials

Open the Terrain Layer Editor (Terrain/Texture...) and import this terrain layers file: frozen_terrain_layers.lay (*File/Import Layers...*). 

 

Then you have some basic frozen colors and detail materials to paint onto your terrain. 

You can also manually set them by clicking (while in the Terrain Layers Editor) the Edit Surface Types button and then Add to add a new Surface Type. Rename this if you want and then click the Material Editor button while your new Surface Type is selected and browse to the desired _frozen material in the Materials/terrain folder. 

Or in the Materials/terrain/frozen folder: 

Adding snow particle system

Add a Particle system with this effect snow.snow.heavy_snow_sheets (click here for the Particle tutorial) to your level. Change the CountScale if you want to have more snow flakes… 

Adding an frosty sound environment

Drag an AmbientVolume Sound Entity (RollupBar/Objects/Entity/Sound/) into your level and add this name to the name property field: Sounds/environment:amb_natural_no_battle:amb_ice_hill 

 

Create a Shape (Objects/Area/) and attach the AmbientVolume Entity by clicking the Pick button on the shape parameters and then selecting the already placed ambient volume entity. 

 

Result

When doing all these steps you should get a nice looking frozen level: