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.

Posted by Mrs_Doublefire @ 1:50 pm EDT | Permalink | 1 Comments

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.

Posted by Mrs_Doublefire @ 4:29 pm EDT | Permalink | 4 Comments

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.

 

Posted by Mrs_Doublefire @ 12:43 pm EDT | Permalink | 3 Comments

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!

Posted by Mrs_Doublefire @ 2:59 am EDT | Permalink | 4 Comments

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.

Posted by Mrs_Doublefire @ 2:09 pm EDT | Permalink | 7 Comments