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Tyranny/Torment: Tides of Numenera mini-dump

A couple games that I worked on were released recently so I thought I'd share some of my work.

The first images are from Tyranny.  I only worked on the project for about a year and the bulk of it was pre-production so I only have a handful of scenes in the game.  The background for the second image was painted by Brian Menze.




The rest of the images are from Torment: Tides of Numenera


This last scene was done primarily by another artist, Jon Gwyn.  My contribution was the two alien-looking buildings at the top.

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  • artofjavi
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    artofjavi triangle
    Wow this is really nice!! I love it!
  • Elithenia
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    Elithenia polycounter
    This is lovely! Well done 
  • EliasWick
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    EliasWick polycounter lvl 9
    I dig the art-style, it's really something that I haven't seen before.
  • CrackRockSteady
    Thanks for the kind words everyone!  I'm glad to hear you like it :)
  • Brian "Panda" Choi
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    Brian "Panda" Choi high dynamic range
  • Niknesh
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    Niknesh polycounter lvl 10
    Great job man!
    I had a blast with Numenera and all of its crazy environments. Story especially of course :)

    If you don't mind, could you explain your workflow a bit? Because there's lots of intricate details in those scenes, going from organic to hard surface. Do you model and texture everything on a scene like that?

    There is a dev video from way back explaining how they assemble things in Unity, which is when I realized how awesome it is, that it's all 2D background from a 3D rendered image. It was for Pillars of Eternity I think.
  • CrackRockSteady
    @Niknesh Great to hear you enjoyed it :)

    The scenes that I worked on for Tyranny, I would say ~80% of the models/textures/materials were made by me.  Our concept artists helped out with some of the tiling textures and I borrowed some of our character models/armor for the soldiers fused into the rock in the top image.  Beyond that, everything was made by me and I was also responsible for setting up the scene in Maya and lighting/rendering everything.

    For the T:TON work we would model/texture everything and set up a scene, then we'd hand it off to a guy who handled all of our lighting and Mental Ray rendering.

    For the most part our workflow was pretty similar to any other game art pipeline, the difference being that because everything was pre-rendered we could cut corners when it came to things like optimizing meshes or efficiently using textures.  For example a lot of stuff we'd just sculpt something in zbrush and then decimate the mesh to a reasonable polycount but still use the high poly mesh and not bother doing a traditional HP to LP bake.
  • Niknesh
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    Niknesh polycounter lvl 10
    Oh wow, thanks for the thorough explanation man, makes a lot of sense now :smiley:
    I'm a huge isometric RPG game fan, played them since like forever (Fallout 1 being the first) and always wondered how it's all done.

    Now that you mentioned it, that top image is Blade Grave, one of the more unique environments due to the story. That's entrance to Oldwalls also. Did you do some of those environments too?

    I'm curios though, why Mental Ray? Are there some special options that are used (like passes etc) or was it already main rendering tool in the pipeline?
  • CrackRockSteady
    I left Obsdian right around the time the Oldwalls areas were being started on but I don't think I contributed much if anything.  The Blade Graves scene was the first real environment created for the game.  We spent a lot of time in pre production working out what the visual style of the game would be and the Blade Graves was chosen to be a Visual Target scene.  It (and the concepts for it) went through quite a few iterations before finally landing where you see it now, but after that we moved on to other areas.

    I can't say for sure why Mental Ray was chosen as the renderer.  When I worked on PoE (The same tech was used for Tyranny and T:TON) it was already later in the project when most of the technical decisions had been made.  Mental Ray was capable of rendering all the various passes that were needed for the visual trickery but I'm not sure if that was the primary reason it was used or if there were other factors involved.
  • Zocky
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    Zocky greentooth
    Hah, amazing stuff man. Was HUGE fan of baldur's gate (2) and such, so seeing here art from  sort basically spiritual successor like that, is just awesome!
  • _Kratos_
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    _Kratos_ polycounter lvl 11
    Really nice stuff!
  • CrackRockSteady
    @_Kratos_ Thanks man!  btw I've been playing Wolfenstein II and the art is *ridiculously* good, awesome work on that :smiley:

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