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.
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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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.
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.
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?
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.