Halo Reach - Environment Dump - Anthony Vaccaro
polycounter lvl 15
Hey guys just thought I would post some of the work I did for Halo Reach while at Bungie. Since Environments and 3D were handled very diffrently at Bungie I made my own thread so you can see whats diffrent and since I think I am the only active person who worked on Environments that posts on PC. Unlike 3D I cant claim full ownership of 100% of whats in the screen shots as many textures/assets were shared among all artists but the areas bellow are areas that are done almost entirely by myself unless stated otherwise.
Boardwalk - This is a multiplayer space I worked on with fellow artists Matt Bennier. The majority of the level was split between the two of us and areas worked on were constantly overlapped by each other. Matt also worked on the initial architecting of the level, and I handled the final polish.
Sword Base Kivas - This campaign space was worked on by myself, Rob Adams, and Matt Turner. I worked on the more unique and mission driven areas in this space. Such as the comm Tower/Comm control pad, generator room, electrical pole, modular stairs/railings and broken wood pieces among others.
Boardwalk - This is a multiplayer space I worked on with fellow artists Matt Bennier. The majority of the level was split between the two of us and areas worked on were constantly overlapped by each other. Matt also worked on the initial architecting of the level, and I handled the final polish.
Sword Base Kivas - This campaign space was worked on by myself, Rob Adams, and Matt Turner. I worked on the more unique and mission driven areas in this space. Such as the comm Tower/Comm control pad, generator room, electrical pole, modular stairs/railings and broken wood pieces among others.
Replies
You guys have done a bang up job. I enjoy the clean and crisp look of the environments.
i applaud you for your hard work and hope to be at your level in the future!
o and welcome to polycount if your new here.
Good times playing through those,
Must have been one hell of a ride,
Can I haz?
Did you work off of any concept art? if so, can you show it?
I hope to be at your level some day in the far far future.
Please share any wires and texture sheets you can. I just want to see what the construction looked like.
i hope you plan on most more amazing stuff soon !
As for break downs and wireframes sadly I do not have any to show for a few reasons. One was I forgot how long it takes to take screen shots and tried to do all of that on my last day at work and just didnt have time to get nice breakdown shots of things. Second since the environments are very large it started to look like black blobs of wireframe lines all over the place. Finally I had to try and decied what was most important to take screen shots of as you dont want to try and show everything you worked on, just the best of the best and things that stand out. Only about 75% of what I worked on is show which is always hard to cut screen shots out of the folio but you have to manage between a good amount of screen shots and too many.
As for Boardwalk the majority structure is made up out of BSP chunks. This was done as it made prepping things for light mapping a lot easier and reduce the amount of light mapping seams while still keeping the large swafts of white panels.
Lighting in outdoor areas was done by the sun system and was set beforehand. We also had 2 contract artists work for the most part just on lighting and the only area I was able to work on lighting in the screen shots above was New Alexandreas condo area and condo basement area.
So no break downs but if you have any specific questions just let me know and I will answer it to the best of my ability.
New Alexandria is one of my favourite levels I love all the skyscrapers look and shapes and Designs they look Faboulose , Looking great the feel , the style and the imersion ....
I am particularly interested in all those rocks and stones and cliffs , did you work on those too ? If not who did and where can I see its portfolio ?
I really like how those where all done and I am wondering how where modeled or textured those rocks and clifs to look so cood either from close and so also when u go far ... Or how does that engine works ? the rocks look so good from distant , I can't see any tile repetition ,( I loved also Red Dead Redemption Rocks , but there I could spot tiles ) , and hows that they look so good by close with such detail ...
Also the terrain and all rest is great ....
My only complain would be about water shaders but that I guess is another field didn't look much updated since Halo 3 ...
Thanks for any answer
For textures Bungie didnt have any one person as a dedicated Texture Artist. Textures were generally created by the environment artists as needed. We of course shared textures/assets throughout the entire game as most studios do. For Reach environment use of textures had to be controlled a lot more then before. From Halo 3 to Reach everyone's budget got bigger expect for environment artists, which actually was smaller then Halo 3.
Main reason for this was all the armor permutations to customize your Spartan. All those helmets, chest plates, shoulder pads and other odds and ends you can use had there own unique texture map. The big problem with this is that EVERY armor permutation, every weapon, every enemy and every vehicle is loaded for every level you play. It never loaded just what your Spartan had on, it loaded all possible permutations. So it adversely effects how many textures you can use for environments.
For New Alexandria (not sure if others did this) but we made a bunch of tmp textures near the start to hit our allotment of textures so we would always know what kind of performance hits we were getting early on. We then would replace those tmp textures with newly created tiling textures that we needed say for the industrial part, or textures we borrowed from other levels that also fit ours.
As for the rocks I cant say with any kind of certainty but I believe half of those were outsourced (could be totally wrong on this) and the others were done by the other full time guys working on the level when they needed a rock. As for the folios of the full time guys it doesn't seem they have updated them in a few years.
The Terrain was handled by the use of a RGB blend shader. This basically gave the ability to blend 3 diffrent shaders (ie grass shader, dirt shader, rock shader) together by the use of a unique map. A unique map was used to blend the terrain as the RGB would correspond to a different shader. So if you use Red for your grass and Green as your Dirt and paint those on the unique 1 to 1 unwrapped map you will get grass everywhere that is Red and Dirt everywhere that is Green. Then when you blend those colors together it blends between dirt and grass.
Very powerful as depending on how much time you put into the blend map you can pretty much remove almost all looks of tiling.
So I get this question a lot so I figued I would answer it here. For concepts I unfortunately didnt have any environment concepts to work off while at Bungie. By the time I got to Bungie the concept artists were transitioning from Reach to the new project and most of the conecpting work they did while I was there were for some more unique 3D assets or a couple of paint overs for areas to better establish trim ideas and such.
For New Alexandria we had a lot of different concepts for the city. The problem was that there was no one concept that was like ok this is what the city is going to look like. So for a lot of the city we created the style as we were creating the levels. There were macro ideas that were set from the concepts that we already had established like the large skyscrapers, large wafts of white panels and glass, chromed frame work with wood and green glassed accents here and there. But for most things they were designed as they were created with keeping those design ideas in mind.
We of course took parts that we liked from various concepts and incorporated them and there was some back and forth early on but we were lucky and seemed to click pretty quickly on the style we wanted and were able to spread it throughout the rest of the city. The two levels that were first worked on that really helped set the style of the city was Beach Head (fire fight space/last level of the city) and Boardwalk (multiplayer space/first level). This were done first as they are multiplayer spaces and would see the most action. Beach Head was done first as it was the "pre-vis" level but a lot of what we did on Boardwalk and the rest of the city influenced a lot of changes to Beach Head right before E3.
Boardwalk did receive a paintover sometime after E3 as Boardwalk is a large bridge and was originally going to be more or less a park on a bridge. So we had a lot of grass and plants all over the place but it was deiced to change it as it looked too much Beach Head with it being mostly green with some whites of the buildings here and then to being more white with bits of green here and there.
Anyway TLDR
Bloody great work btw
Great execution in the environment art here, you kept true to the whole universe and shapes that we all recognize from the franchise.
Great stuff!