Kingdom was a fun collaboration with Derek Bentley - he owned the central castle and its related kits and established the initial art blockout for the map to inspire our Level Designer Dave Osei. This map was Dave's little ode to Elden Ring's golden fields, though personally I had Gladiator's wheat fields in mind. I picked up from Derek's terrain blockout and brought it over to the finish line - fleshing out the two sides of the map's biomes further (wheat fields in front of the castle and the flower-ey castle grounds behind the castle).
It was another fun map to work on with the larger macro storytelling elements we had with the signs of a larger than life battle that happened. It was also pleasure going back and forth with Level Design and creating great framing of the amazing castle POIs Derek and Steve put together. Working on the set extension/vista for the map was a really fun one as well to give the map epic scale, working off some fantastic concepts from Gabe. It was another a good example of something I took on, given our smaller art team. Normally that would be something we have a dedicated Vista Artist for on a larger team.
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.
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:
Robert Taube
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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 (Lead)
https://www.artstation.com/nicholasschumaker
https://www.artstation.com/gabberwocky
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Level Designer:
Dave Osei
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FX Artist:
https://www.artstation.com/mreberg (Director)
https://www.artstation.com/ryanbartonvfx
Christopher Shepherd
