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Ethan Ayer (Senior Environment Artist -Vistas, Santa Monica Studio)
Location: Room 301, South Hall
Date: Tuesday, March 21
Time: 3:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Pass Type: All Access Pass, Summits Pass
Topic: Visual Arts
Format: Lecture
Vault Recording: Video
Audience Level: Intermediate
The God of War series is known for its grand scale including epic beautiful vista environments that span across the horizon. God of War: Ragnarök continues this tradition. This presentation will be the definitive how-to-make awesome vista environments for AAA games. It will begin by covering the various functions of vistas, from level-swapping LOD backgrounds to epic hero landscapes. It will then dive deep into the process of making vista environments, starting with the overall composition, then asset creation, and bringing it to ship quality. Examples taken from God of War: Ragnarök will be used to identify the various challenges of working on such a large scale. Artistic methods and techniques commonly used to address these challenges along with optimization will be discussed in finer detail.
Attendees will learn about vista environments, what role they play in art direction, and what distinguishes them from environment art that exists within the play space. They will learn about the different approach required to tackle larger background environments and the artistic processes used to create assets within a performance budget.
This session is for artists, leads, and developers who are interested artistic methods that specifically addressing large-scale environments.