HALO 5 - Skybox Art

sky_boxer

Hey Polycounters,

Wow I finally got around to making this post!  This is a collection of a few pieces that I had worked on while contracting at 343 Industries as a Skybox Artist for Halo 5 : Guardians. We did some matte painting along with 3d geo to pull off most of the skybox work. I was responsible for most of the skyboxes for the planet Meridian in campaign and also made the skybox for one of the Forge levels as well. I also worked on the Skyboxes for both Truth & Regret maps, which were announced during the beta phase. Working with the skybox team at 343 Industries was a complete blast . I definitely owe a lot of what I learnt during my stint there to the skybox, concept, environment art and lighting teams at 343 Industries. 

Here is a youtube link of all the skybox stuff that I worked on and below that are some screenshots describing more of the role I had to play while working on them. It was fun flying around the level to make these captures!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB332C36UWk

Planet Meridian's space elevator skybox : Making this sequence to was an interesting problem to solve since we had to make multiple layers of skyboxes for different levels of altitude & then the animation team stepped in to make it all move upwards as you go down to the planets surface . I was responsible for making 2 of the 3 skyboxes that you see at various levels of elevation while going down the space elevator. This one is the skybox from the topmost level of the elevator. 

This one is from the lower level of the space elevator just before you reach the planet's surface. 

Planet Meridian's ground level vista : The ground level of Meridian had to look very alien and wavy, almost like it was liquefied first and then cooled down. I had to make large crater like formations and then make their edges look like waves that hardened as they curled up. I picked up cues from the pointy shapes that was existing in the rocks that were in the game play area by the environment art team. The terrain assets were made in World Machine & Zbrush. I textured them in Mari and lit them in the engine. The atmospheric effects were done using cards with scrolling textures. They sky was a matte painting started by Oliver Regueiro, the skybox lead and finished off by me.

The mine side of the Meridian vistas : The terrain was made in World Machine and textured in Mari. The big mining machines were provided by the environment team and i just placed them in there. 

Planet meridian evacuation vista : A variant of the same vista was needed for later when the massive Guardian breaks through the surface. The art direction required that the sky and terrain looked menacing, dramatic and hot. The terrain was pretty much the exact same one as the one from the first version but I added new textures and also replaced the skydome with a completely new matte painted version.

Planet Meridian Evacuation Space Elevator skybox : This one relied heavily on matte painting with cards as geo to scroll tiled cloud textures to give some movement. I used Vue to render the clouds and did some painting over it and used a mix of photos and renders for the moving clouds.

Forge glacier Skybox : This one was my favorite one to work on as I love snowy landscapes! The process was pretty much the same as described before, except that I used Quadspinner's Geoglyph package for World Machine to pull of some nice detail in record time. The foreground ice cliff in the image below was done by the environment art team, rest is all from yours truly.

A variant of the same skybox

Hope that was useful and you folks enjoyed it!

thanks!

abcdethan

Great work! The sculpted terrain really provides that immersive feel of an environment. Can you go more into depth how you used Mari for texturing?  

Nuclear Angel

This is great! Thanks for sharing. 

Ged

really interesting seeing this side of how the game was made, would love to know more of the process used to get these done, like for example how do you render out clouds? terragen or vue or something? do you literally use a box or is it a dome of some sort?

RobeOmega

really interesting seeing this side of how the game was made, would love to know more of the process used to get these done, like for example how do you render out clouds? terragen or vue or something? do you literally use a box or is it a dome of some sort?

Quote from OP:
"Planet Meridian Evacuation Space Elevator skybox : This one relied heavily on matte painting with cards as geo to scroll tiled cloud textures to give some movement. I used Vue to render the clouds and did some painting over it and used a mix of photos and renders for the moving clouds."

Hope this helps!

sky_boxer

abcdethan said:

Great work! The sculpted terrain really provides that immersive feel of an environment. Can you go more into depth how you used Mari for texturing?  

Thanks a lot! I used Mari since it has a great real-time masking feature which none of the other texturing packages I know of had. Also, Mari lets me bring in really high res mesh for painting which helps with how these real-time masks pick up all the little features on the surface of the terrain.It's especially helpful when you are trying to build masks on terrain/vista that has been altered a fair bit by sculpting on them after getting them out of world machine. I also love how easy it is to do everything in Mari! If you know photoshop you can pick it up in no time. 

sky_boxer

Nuclear Angel said:

This is great! Thanks for sharing. 

You are very welcome!

sky_boxer

Ged said:

really interesting seeing this side of how the game was made, would love to know more of the process used to get these done, like for example how do you render out clouds? terragen or vue or something? do you literally use a box or is it a dome of some sort?

Robeomega said:

really interesting seeing this side of how the game was made, would love to know more of the process used to get these done, like for example how do you render out clouds? terragen or vue or something? do you literally use a box or is it a dome of some sort?

Quote from OP:
"Planet Meridian Evacuation Space Elevator skybox : This one relied heavily on matte painting with cards as geo to scroll tiled cloud textures to give some movement. I used Vue to render the clouds and did some painting over it and used a mix of photos and renders for the moving clouds."

Hope this helps!

I did use Terragen as well. I actually used it to render out the green gas giant and also the clouds for the planets in the first screen shot, and then painted over it in PS. used some photographic elements too from some photos that I had taken while flying. the base sky is a dome and the cloud elements are cards.

This was a previous iteration for the planet which didn't make it into the game because art direction wanted more clouds to cover up the terrain seen from above. It was fully rendered in Terragen.

abcdethan

sky_boxer said:

I used Mari since it has a great real-time masking feature which none of the other texturing packages I know of had. Also, Mari lets me bring in really high res mesh for painting which helps with how these real-time masks pick up all the little features on the surface of the terrain.It's especially helpful when you are trying to build masks on terrain/vista that has been altered a fair bit by sculpting on them after getting them out of world machine. I also love how easy it is to do everything in Mari! If you know photoshop you can pick it up in no time. 

Thanks for sharing!  It is fascinating to hear about how elaborate skyboxes are made in next-gen games these days.  I have used Mari a little in production before and I see the potential for 3D skybox work.  It is a very powerful tool. I was surprised that you used Terragen in addition to Vue.  What made you want to use Terragen over Vue in some cases?  Also, were the skies authored in sRGB colorspace or HDR?

Polynaught

Didn't know of GeoGlyph before you posted this. So thx.

sky_boxer

abcdethan said:

sky_boxer said:

I used Mari since it has a great real-time masking feature which none of the other texturing packages I know of had. Also, Mari lets me bring in really high res mesh for painting which helps with how these real-time masks pick up all the little features on the surface of the terrain.It's especially helpful when you are trying to build masks on terrain/vista that has been altered a fair bit by sculpting on them after getting them out of world machine. I also love how easy it is to do everything in Mari! If you know photoshop you can pick it up in no time. 

Thanks for sharing!  It is fascinating to hear about how elaborate skyboxes are made in next-gen games these days.  I have used Mari a little in production before and I see the potential for 3D skybox work.  It is a very powerful tool. I was surprised that you used Terragen in addition to Vue.  What made you want to use Terragen over Vue in some cases?  Also, were the skies authored in sRGB colorspace or HDR?

Yes indeed Mari is quite powerful for this kind of work. I used Terragen despite its horrible viewport and interface just because it renders planetary stuff way better than view. With Vue I will never be able to get a rendered planet look quite as realistic as the one I can get out of Terragen. The skies were not authored in HDR.

sky_boxer

Polynaught said:

Didn't know of GeoGlyph before you posted this. So thx.

You are very welcome!

Ged

Thanks a lot for the information, Its really tricky getting skyboxes/domes to look beautiful but also have believable perspective, detail and scale so I always find threads like this interesting.

sky_boxer

Ged said:

Thanks a lot for the information, Its really tricky getting skyboxes/domes to look beautiful but also have believable perspective, detail and scale so I always find threads like this interesting.

You are very welcome Ged! It's a tricky thing for sure. Doing photography seriously has helped me a lot. I used to do a lot of professional photography work before and that's actually my stepping stone to matte painting. And then later into 3D.  That's tremendously helped with studying perspective, detail and scale as you had mentioned.