With permission from Wildlight, we're allowed to show WIP future content we were working on. Map 7 was going to be a special one. A crashed blimp, an epic felled dragon, a scorched and wartorn battlefield inspired by WW1. I'm sad I won't get to finish this open-world landscape, it was shaping up to be a fun one to work on with a lot of built-in environment storytelling embedded into the landscape and very different and less 'cheery' than our other maps. These shots are as WIP as it gets and a glimpse into how things look while in heavy development before any polish is applied - this is somewhere between art blockout and before our propagation phase starts where we start propagating near final assets (that we created during the style creation phase, which we were in the middle of). That's where we start bringing the whole map together across POIs, landscape, etc. During the art blockout phase, I went back and forth with the Map’s Designer Alex Graner on refining compositions across the map along the main roads to get multiple opportunities to get good views on the dragon, the crashed blimp, etc. That was also when the initial pass on the different biomes painting was done (lush lupine biome, burnt biome, etc.). I was close to finalizing the burnt biome before we got news of the layoff - the burnt tree set was close to final and destructible, scorched ground material layers were tuned up, ground debris/grass types were created and set up, etc.

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Environment storytelling-wise, it was really fun to push the burnt biome throughout the map and imagining long breaths of fire scorching large parts of the map. It was particularly satisfying diving into WW1 reference research to take inspiration for all of it as well. As I mentioned, there's a lot of built-in environmental storytelling embedded into the terrain itself between the crashed blimp leaving a trail in the terrain, scorch lines throughout the map, battle signs everywhere, etc.

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I owned the open-world landscape outside of the main POIs: landscape creation (sculpting, materials (new and re-used), painting), foliage creation (ground foliage/bushes/trees + tree destruction), props, vista, 1st pass lighting, etc. Derek Bentley owned the amazing Dragon POI I had the pleasure to compose to all across the map and Kristen Altamirano owned the crashed blimp POI. Paul Tran owned the giant tanks littering the battlefield.

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Our environments were a colossal team effort by a relatively small team by AAA standards (we shipped with 7 Environment Artists with no environment outsourcing!). There was a lot new we had to built, but we also had to be efficient and smartly re-use the asset bank that we built up across maps.
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Art Director / Lighting:
https://www.artstation.com/rtaube
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Lead Environment Artist:
https://www.artstation.com/jzartist
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Environment Artists:
https://www.artstation.com/jobyek
https://www.artstation.com/paultran
https://www.artstation.com/jakevirginia
https://www.artstation.com/artkristen
https://www.artstation.com/shong1123
https://www.artstation.com/dbentley3d
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Environment Concept Artists:
https://www.artstation.com/gabe-11
https://www.artstation.com/nicholasschumaker
https://www.artstation.com/gabberwocky
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Level Designer:
Alex Graner
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FX Artist:
https://www.artstation.com/mreberg
https://www.artstation.com/ryanbartonvfx
Christopher Shepherd