Saturday, August 22, 2009
Iceland 2 Chimeran Interior
About 30 m below ground or something rediculous lies the Chimeran Node Interior. I struggled with this. I won't lie. Chimeran architecture is an artform all it's own! At this point during my career I was hell bent on "characterizing" my environments. I say that because we're often in a hurry to create our environments and get them polished up. It's the nature of the beast. We ship a game a year and we pride ourselves on that! With the Node interior I attempted an experiment to make the entire level modular. In my opinion it was largely a success! But it came with many growing pains for me as an artist. I knew I had to make it modular if I wanted to characterize my pieces meaning I would take a little extra time on each piece and make it really special. This of course would not allow the time for a lot of pieces to be made so I worked with my designer to sort of balloon straw the level into manageable pieces. Balloonstrawing a level means that we break up the work load by creating high quality rooms seperated by modular corridors or whatever. Though this seams like it would be wholely linear gameplay it's actually quite easy to provide choice or the illusion of it with modular systems. Many of the columns were done with nice high to low models and the floors were a combination of that and zbrush. I've fully integrated zbrush into my environment pipeline as of the day of this writing and it all started by characterizing my environment. Some people knock modular systems and it's really a matter of preference. I can't say it's the optimal solution for every situation. But the Node was a very special place with very special circumstances and limitations. In the end the art turned out great and the experiment was worth the growing pains.
Labels:
chimera,
chimeran node,
iceland 2,
insomniac games,
node,
resistance 2,
screenshots,
yancy,
yancy young
Resistance 2 Iceland 2
Iceland 2 was a massive undertaking. Two-thirds of which I'm not showing you here because the rest of my team burned rubber creating it. There was an army base battle, a natural battelfield, and the Node. I was tasked with everything Chimeran in the environment for this level. We again had a large land mark called The Chimeran Node. I have to give props to my buddy Jason Anderson http://www.jasoncanderson.com for helping me along with this. We started Resistance prototyping this bad boy and I finished it up. I enjoy these projects because they're challenging and sometimes I feel like a magician because I'm working every angle to create the illusion of granduer while still trying to work under the limits of our engine and budget. The Node was made up of maybe 20 pieces. Each was constructed in a way to provide the optimum amount of reuse. Of course one can see that this is created from like materials and modular parts. But the hope was that we could make each piece feel a little different than the next. This way we could provide quality art in very little time.
Labels:
chimera,
chimeran node,
iceland 2,
node,
resistance,
resistance 2,
screenshots,
yancy young
Friday, August 14, 2009
Twin Falls Gun Towers
Twin Falls came with a special project. A set of massive gun towers protecting the region. These were a lot of fun to produce and took some innovative thinking on our part. In the end I think we captured the right scope and scale. Unfortunately due to time constraints we weren't able to do all that we hoped for in the towers. Maybe we'll revisit them again.
Labels:
chimera,
resistance 2,
screenshots,
twin falls,
yancy,
yancy young
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