Anthony Beyer, technical art director at The Game Bakers, dives into Cairn's technical art and using 3D blendmaps and Compute Shaders in Unity to sync "No-Piton Surfaces" between visuals and gameplay.

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Anthony Beyer, technical art director at The Game Bakers, explains how they built 'No-Piton Surfaces' for the rock-climbing game Cairn. The team needed to visually mark and gameplay-enforce zones where players cannot plant pitons. They started with a 2D blendmap approach using a custom TexturePainter tool, but hit limitations with caves and concave/convex geometry. They evolved to a Texture3D-based 3D blendmap solution. To sync visuals with gameplay logic, they used a Compute Shader that mirrors the exact same sampling code as the rock shader, ensuring texel-perfect detection of whether a player is on a No-Piton Surface. They also added multi-sample checks around the player position to avoid unfair edge cases, and implemented LOD decals for distant No-Piton Areas.

Cairn: Technical Art of “No-Piton Surfaces” with 3D Blendmaps and Compute Shaders