Mrs_Doublefire's Blog - 2old2play

Redemption

I called my wife as soon as my 360 broke(see below) and asked her where she got it. She told me, she got it at Best Buy with a two year service plan. I called Best Buy to see if they could look that up and they confirmed it was purchased on December 22, 2005. Just under the wire! So I packed up all my goodies and marched on down there. After a few minutes of keyboard typing and asking what was wrong with it, she says go pick up a new one. Then I say, just out of curiosity, can I pick up any other version and pay the difference? She says yes but I can't swap the hard drive. Without further ado, I pick up a new Halo 3 Edition and the computer says it's an even swap because it was a first gen price tag. Score! I don't really care that much about the stuff I've downloaded as I don't play those that much. For a mere $25, I can re-download the few games I do play.

Yeah for service plans and a new Halo 3 360 with HDMI for nothing!

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Obituary

Sigh!

My XBOX360 just died. Everyone knows of the red ring of death. I got mine this morning. I probably wouldn't be so upset were it not for the fact that the Heroic map pack comes out tomorrow. I wonder how fast I can get it back if I send it in? I really want the new Halo edition one but, a, I asked for it for Christmas and, b, all my money is tied up for Christmas.

Such a sad day.

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Return of the Hog Run

Halo 3 ends a lot like it did in Halo Combat Evolved, minus the countdown timer. The Halo Hog run was by far my largest assignment and most crucial. With most of the Studio Artists finishing off the other more highly detailed levels, I along with another noobie, Dave Dunn, and designer, Dan Miller, embarked on finishing the fight with this ambitious level close to the last hour. Really, the last month before polish, but you get what I'm saying. Where some levels have had years in development, we had a month. Dave and Dan had been doing some preliminary layout stuff earlier but nothing concrete and we had one piece of concept art to go on. Cameron Pinard, my fellow noob, was tasked with all of the plates and platforms that fall and blow up. I was tasked with the rest of the environment. I worked section by section as I was given a blocked layout from Dave regarding how movement through the level would work and where our visual occlusions were going to be. Basically, I had to transition from the memory room hallway to this trench run and define the look of what a Halo would look like if it were totally under construction like the last Death Star. So basically, I developed a sort of underlying grid work of structures that could be pieced together in different configurations to form what ever superstructure needed to be formed to support the natural terrain. Then, of course I had to make the terrain as well. Additionally, I made those giant towers and ribbed substructures under the plates. These shots are using default lighting, so I'm sorry about that. However, you get to see what a level looks like without light maps.

In the above image, you are looking back on the hallway exit. Looking to the right in this image or the left when you are playing, you might want to check that area out for an alternate trench run experience.

Fans of the first Halo might recognize this "island" structure.

This concludes my environment work. Up next is UI help, skyboxes, and general polishing.

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Assault on the Control Room

I guess I did too good of a job on terrain finishing because I did a lot of it as an environment artist.The next such case is on the last level, Halo. As with my other assignments, I finish modeled, UV unwrapped, and did initial shaders on the exterior terrain leading up to the control room. This includes the Pelican approach, crash site, skull trench, drop shaft, and the control room, snow bowl.

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Floor Reloaded

If you remember back to my first post about environments, you'll recall my discussion about work that changes. That first interior Forerunner space had a floor element that ran through it, and still does. However, it now closely resembles the underglass machinery on the level Construct. Originally it was the image below with the round ends continuing to the disk shaped entances and exits. It, along with my holo projector, were re-formatted for use in the ring hall's sub-rooms. Of course, my hologram was was replaced by a hologram of the prophet.

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The Citadel Bowl

Also known as The Covenant crater. Whichever name you know it by, it's that big snowy half moon where you traverse down the cliffside and then battle a couple Scarabs. I worked on this pit and the trench that leads to it. It was a very similar process to what I did on The Ark. However, the geometry wasn't nearly as finished as it was on The Ark. I did quite a bit more modeling on this terrain. The trench went through a big change in that I had to make it 30% longer while maintaining visual occlusion. This was a time based change because the space was used as a loading zone. So it had to be long enough for the fastest vehicle you could ride through the space to not be able to see what hadn't loaded yet by getting there too quickly. I hope that made sense. There are similar loading zones throughout the game. You might remember that series of zigzaggy hallways on The Storm, after you kill the first Scarab. As with my work on The Ark, I am not responsible for the Forerunner stuff, nor the trees, nor sky. I modeled, UV unwrapped and did initial shader work on the terrain.

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That's So Wastefull!

It's a desert waste land! That's probably why the internal name for The Ark was known as Waste. My biggest task for this level was all of the terrain work. When I got this assignment, all of the level design and major modelling had been done. My job was to smooth out any major jagginess, sepparate out parts and remodel if necessary to hide texture seems, UV unwrap all the texture coordinates and do initial shader work. Additionally, I did the same for all of the individual boulders. In the images below, I used the debug tools to remove as much of the non level BSP clutter as I did not do those things. You will also notice some bareroot trees and Forerunner architecture. I didn't work on that. Just the terrain.

Durring the Polish phase I revisited this map on a few occasions to fix, tweak, or completely replace a few objects. I don't currently have images of that work as I really just, minorly, contributed to them. Later on I may just do some game screenshots to include and explain. For now though, we will leave Waste alone.

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Monsters in the Closet, Under the Bunker!

Here are a couple of environment pieces that I can take almost all of the credit for. They appear on the level, The Ark.

This is a monster closet. What's a monster closet, you say? A monster closet is a space in a level that doesn't go anywhere but looks like it does. This space is used to spawn more and more enemies until you eventually round that corner and the illusion that they are just appearing from nowhere is lost. When I got this it was just a very shallow box whole in the side of this hill. I gave it some visual character inside and out and made it a ramp hallway down to a locked door. The shaders on the insided are just those from elsewhere in the level but the one on the outside, I made myself.

This is the Scarab bunker. It's not all that impressive, and out of all of my work, I like it the least. The basic shape was modeled when I got it so I added a lot of the modeled in details and then UVed and textured it. Mainly, I don't like the top of it but the inside is kind of nice. One of the restrictions with this was that it couldn't have any new shaders. There was already so much going on in this space and we were starting to get worried about disk space on the DVD too.

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AAARRrrrrrggg!

Sorry, this is not a developer entry.

I'm soooo pissed right now! The lamps in my 40 inch Samsung LCD started flickering and went out in the middle of a ranked Team Slayer game. I had joined up with 2 really good players and we were doing really well with a 6 and 1 one record. I had to hide and hope I wasn't killed I finally had to quite and give up the exp for that game. I had one kill before finding a hiding spot and stayed alive for a really long time. Stats aren't up right now but I think we still won. That's not really too important. What is, is that I bought this TV in mid September of last year. That means it's just past it's year waranty and I'm gonna have to cough up some dough to get this thing fixed!

Bah!

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You've Been Promoted!

I was the third person hired on for the contract 3D Artist position. Total, I think there were 11 of us hired on at different times over the period of about 6 months. The first hiree was "really" promoted and hired on full time when he hit about 6 months on his contract. Us contractors were seated upstairs with the testers, away from the full timers. There was definitely a disconnect. We only talked to our leads and art directors. Well this first guy went downstairs when he was hired on full time. No biggie, it was expected. Well at my 6 month mark, myself and hirees two and four were given promotions as well.

We became Environment Artists and were moved downstairs. This put us into a little bit of limbo. We weren't full timers but we weren't part of the group upstairs. We had just proved ourselves for 6 months as object artists but now we were under scrutiny again sitting next to all of the other full time environment artists. Basically, it was exciting but stressfull. This happened about half way through the BFG.

On to my first task as an environment artist. I was given the task to finish out and detail the very first interior Forerunner structure you come upon and it's exterior entrances. This is on The Ark level after you kill the Hunters and climb the hill into the cave. A lot of this work was tweaking uvs and adding details. Some of this work got covered up or changed on another finish pass but a lot of it stayed intact. I added a floor glass element to break up the floor and some exterior disk pylons. Some of this was changed but the ideas were mine. You'll find this a lot in all of the levels. There were quite a few instances where people would get assigned the same thing a little while after it was already worked on. It was a little difficult to get used to this but it makes the game look phenomenal. Different artists have styles and ideas about things and no one artist can possibly have made one environment what it was. Some of what I did was populate the Forerunner style from the rest of the level into this space. You may think this doesn't take much but believe me it does. Plus, it was kind of a good task to help me learn the environment pipeline. Remember, artists are responsible for getting our work in game and addressing any of it's bugs. Here are a couple of shots of that area that did not change after I worked on it.

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That's a Big F###ing Gun!

Known internally as the BFG, the Covenant AA Battery was my last official object as a 3d artist. Not to worry we're only about half way through my contract. This was another doosie to make. Bungie was big on dropping me in the deep end but I guess that was them testing my limits. As you know, until the flood door, I had been doing nothing but human objects. Now I have to make a Covenant object, but not just any Covenant object. No, this is the size of a Scarab with moving parts and destructibility. Luckily, I had some concept art to go off of but I was able to put my own influence into the art. With concept art, it is usually just a guideline to shoot for, the detailing is left up to the artist creating it. As you know, by playing the game, this thing has a fusion core that drops down for you to shoot it. I thought this was a little anticlimactic. It should have been a little harder than eliminating all of the resistance and taking down the core quickly. The explosion was kind of lack luster as well. I'm complaining a bit here but the original plans and animatics were much better than what made it into the game. Anyway, this is one of the things I'm most proud of in the game.

This is the way it looked when I sort of finished it. Below is the way it ended up when we went into the polish phase. Notice the final version is a lot dirtier and brownish to match the AA Wraith. Also the neck was flipped around the gun is more streamlined looking for when it fires.

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Mmmm Donuts!

If you ever wanted to play Halo in an ass, now you can. Come jump through my sphyncter to escape the flood.

So the art direction for this was it's got have these crusty fingers that open outward into a tubular membrane. Here's the kicker it is alive and can be shot and killed. It was actually quite complicated making this with all of the bones, vertex weighting, animations, and then making it have distruction permutations as well as the garbage bits that fly off of it when it blows up. So I spent quite a bit of my time making this. Probably a good month and a half from initial construction through all of the changes that went into it for design and performance reasons. All in all it's still quite gross and awesome at the same time but you can't make it blow up anymore. Luckily, I've got one shot where you can see it blown up with the chunks laying around.

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The Zanz....... Last Resort Blowout!

I still call it Zanzibar but Last Resort was my other substantial contribution to multiplayer, after High Ground. Destination one was the rotating fan. The first thing to do here was to res up the center and make it more round and generally make the whole model a little more eye pleasing. Next up was the texture shaders, These took a major jump up to twice the resolution. Basically, I remade the whole thing and used the original for reference. You also might notice there is some color on it now, as with a lot of things in Halo 3. Another big contributer to Halo 3 beauty is the addition of micro bumps and micro detail bitmaps. Things that add even more detail when you get up close to them.

A lot of people didn't know what that weird metal thing in the middle of Zanzibar(Halo 2) was. It looked a lot like a 1970's space capsule. In reality it was supposed to be the nose cone that fits the center of the fan. I knew that was a problem so I made every effort to make it look like it fit on the fan this time and it actually does.

Here is a shot of the fan with nosecone attached. I thought this would be cool to have out in the background of surrounding areas in the game but it didn't make it.

Next we have the new gate. Originally, this was a packaged gate and barricade lock. The new gate was going to be industrial with broken glass windows above for sniping. The doors were going to be hinged like giant swinging meat locker doors. The Barricades were supposed to be the lock and the tombstones were so you could jump up on them and shoot through the windows while the door was still locked. The designers felt that it tested really well without the doors in place and decided to just use the tombstones. I think it looks a bit odd without the door, but what do I know about art?!

Keeping with the barricade theme, these are your run of the mill vehicle security barricades. Haloized for your enjoyment. It might have been better to use two sets of these instead of the other barricade at the old gate location.

Lastly, I replaced the giant rocks at the old rocket ammo location with these cool electricty transformers. After all, this is a energy generating plant.

Enjoy!

[4 Comments]

Get Tactical Marines!

Today we come to the extent of my military objects. All of these appeared in the beta and I've pointed them out to a few of you. This first one was fun because it kind of took me back to the armory on the Pillar of Autumn. It's a mobile version of that where the designers can put any number of different weapons in different configurations. I only wish they could have made this and the drop pods work for multiplayer. It would have been cool to be able go to a case or pod to get a weapon like in the campaign. If you look close at the yellow label on the side the serial number is MR 5D8 LFI R3. If you rearrange the spacing you might see MR5 D8LFIR3.

These military radios are really cool, in my humble opinion. They are my contribution to many a multiplayer map as well as the campaign. Shoot one next time and think of me!

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More Crow

Here are a couple of more images from the Crow's Nest suite.

This fuel tank ultimately became the fuel bomb that gets detonated to blow up the base. This is what it looked like when I first created it. When they repurposed it they just stuck a bunch of detonator crap on it.

Here are some UNSC missles and missle racks. These can also be seen strewn about other levels such as The Storm, Floodgate, and The Pit.

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