![]() ![]() For Destiny and Destiny 2 a lot of assets were created already by the sky lead Mark Goldsworthy, and I would use what was there to create new views. Having a library of assets really speeds up the process of creating a background. I’m constantly exploring new ways to make terrain and have way too many experiments to count on my computer. I’m also an obsessive user of World Machine and Houdini’s heightfield generators. I have several hundred terrain pieces I’ve made over the years and I use these as a library to block out the view. So I try to gather reference that fits the mood of the concept art. 90% of the time the concept art will just use a photo found on the internet for the background in a scene. I then start gathering reference or look at the concept art for the space. The first thing I do before I start on a background is exploring every corner of the playspace to find the best viewpoints. I’m experimenting with new ways to create movement all the time. Tiled clouds scrolling across the sky work really well. Just keep the animations simple, and they can go a long way to make the sky come to life! Most movement on clouds comes from shader work. Just a couple of looping keyframes usually get the job done! I’ve animated sun arch, spaceships, and even cloud cards. I like really simple spline animated objects. Basically, every studio is different on how their animation pipeline works. The animation is fun! I like doing little animations to make the background feel more alive. To get a cohesive look to a map you can use post-processing and fog to get a look that has that concept art feel.įirst, make a second layer and fill it with black. Also, I usually touch the global lighting of a map to set the mood. You can make cloud cards in Terragen, Vue, Houdini, and Photoshop. Games seem to be going more toward volumetric clouds, but I still love crafting 2D clouds. Cloud creation is all over the place right now! I’m loving the new procedural volumetric stuff out there and well crafted matte paintings. I’m still learning and honing my composition skills any way I can. ![]() I also create full 360 panoramas and just try to craft a decent composition. I cobble together pieces of 2D clouds and make alpha cards out of them. I take thousands of pictures of clouds and landscape shots throughout the year. Remember to reduce, reuse, and when in doubt – fog it out. Just hide as much as you can with as little as you can. Anything you can do to help performance out! I try to place alpha cards sparingly in the environment, but this helps break up a ridgeline and blend terrain seems. I author my textures fairly high res, but I crunch them down to as low as I can without the quality suffering. Delete out unseen polygons and crunch your textures down with MIPs. I think the best approach is to keep it as simple as possible, reduce, and reuse as many assets as you can. The technical aspects of making a sky can be broken down into multiple articles over time. Also, Destiny (2014) had an impact on my appreciation for background art, and so I started making skyboxes in my free time.īeing a background artist in games requires a lot of various skills. That game really changed what I wanted to focus on. I became obsessed with creating terrain and distant mountains after playing Skyrim. Most playable gameplay spaces are small, but adding set extensions creates an illusion the games are a lot larger. I would play games and focus on all the stuff in the background and I realized that most games need non-playable background art. I got into background/sky art because I love being outside, and wanted to focus more on landscape art. It has been a 12-year journey of failures and success. I started in the game industry as a QA tester at a company called Terminal Reality, and eventually worked my way into doing environment art on the projects mentioned above. I’m currently working at V1 Interactive on an unannounced project. I have worked on a number of projects over the years: Epic Mickey, Sims 3 Pets, Warhammer: Dark Millennium Online, Destiny 2, and more. My name is Tony Arechiga, I currently live in Washington State. ![]()
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