Mike Bantick
Saturday, 18 April 2009 11:36
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
iTWire: Sticking with the art direction in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the concept art for the project seems to have evolved from some original ideas which have modified over the course of the games development.
DS: Well I think, the real difference is that making art is an evolutionary thing. Making our game, the way you will see the final product, it is not an overnight thing. We work on it, whittling our way and evolving towards something new, maybe a different take to what we saw originally.
Surprisingly we find that is a way better direction, the concept art is just a starting platform.
Everybody on the team has a different background, and the end up contributing their own talents to influence the end image.
The concept art are guidelines, and we end up saying; “how can we push the lighting here, how can we push our surface shaders?”
How can we make sure that in the end we have something that is visually cohesive, not just in the still shot, but when you walk around?
iTWire: It looks as if you have gone to great lengths to combine the art with the game elements; a case in point is the slow motion effect of Wolverines attack.
DS: That’s right, working with the Unreal engine, the challenge for us was, how do we polish what we have? We have a nice platform to start with, how can we finesse this into moments where people will put down the controller and say “Holy Cow! That is amazing”.
We are trying to pump up the action, but you are right, it is not just the art, it is the design, it’s performance, it’s programming, it’s everything, to make sure we have a cohesive game.
iTWire: On level design, and the environment, talk me through how this will work in the game.
DS: We have a few different stages, one of the ways we start with level design is with an overview of how we want the missions structured. Where are they? What is the overall goal for each area?
You really try to breakdown the game play into hour by hour, minute by minute and second by second action. So the flow of each level is up to the designer.
They do an initial block-out, really rough with everything shaped out of cubes and cylinders. It’s mainly meant to be a blocking thing, but it gets locked down as recognizable locations.
Then our art team comes in, now we know the shape of a room, let’s polish it. So they take a high-res screen shot of the ‘blocks’, really rough looking environment where the concept artist will paint over it and say; “This is what I think it should look like”, this casts the vision for the rest of the art staff.
Then the art team breaks down the smaller ‘cubes’ say to make a computer console or similar, making all the different individual models, textures the shaders and then the final thing that brings it together is the lighting.
So the designers are the spearhead, and then we fall through behind them.
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