Whitedagger Pass

This week was definitely a busy one for us. Especially us artists. We worked our butts off to get Whitedagger Pass art complete so we could get ready to work on the Drago Mines.

As Sibyl and Kyle were churning out models, I was churning out textures, and the level designers were putting everything together very nicely. It was kind of a messy process, simply because the assets were getting in late. We were all kind of scrambling and pulling late nights just to get it done. As Chris was getting his models and terrain done, he was asking for impromptu textures for different kinds of snow. I also had to jump in and do a few models because everyone else was so busy with everything!

Sibyl did an amazing job with the buildings for Whitedagger. Oooh are they beautiful! These were much better than I even expected. She really went above and beyond to not only make them look good, but they also fit together in different modular ways, and there's also a great variety (so it's not just one building model scaled up or down). 

I knew the textures had to be spot on for the buildings. The colour palette was crucial, because Whitedagger Pass -- being primarily ice and snow -- is a mostly blue/white level. It was vital that the colours of the structural elements around the level -- like wood beams, stairs, and buildings -- were perfect accents to the overwhelming blue and whiteness.

I made a bunch of different colour palettes and applied them to the buildings and presented them to the group. After some voting, it became pretty clear that the buildings had to be brown to contrast the snow and ice. I kept some elements blue for decorative-detail-accent purposes. Making the buildings all brown would just be too monotonous. 

Here are all the building pieces together!

Also here was my brick texture that you see everywhere:

This started as cubes in Maya, which I brought into ZBrush to sculpt. I then exported the high poly models back into Maya and arranged them in a brick pattern. I projected those high poly models onto a plane to create a normal map.

After Whitedagger got its extreme makeover, a group of us headed to the labs to take screenshots and enjoy our pretty level. We ended up taking like 200 screenshots all together, because we needed a really good one to put in our Senior Book.

This year, Champlain is sending out a Senior Book for recruiters interested in our graduates. We did personal ones which pretty much acted as resumes, and then we had to do one for our games. 

I know this is going to benefit me later on, and the faculty is just trying to make it easier/better for recruiters to hire us, but sometimes it feels like this stuff is getting in the way. I know Alex (primarily) is working on this document, and he barely has enough time to do the other work he's supposed to be doing. Stress doubles every time you have something new to work on. 

Anyway, we also released an art spotlight video on YouTube for the new Whitedagger Pass. Here it is: 

Furthermore, I did some work on fire level assets that Kyle started work on. We've still got a TON of stuff to do. It's a good thing we dropped that third map...