A call out to Titan Quest's artists

[b0kkie]

For the last couple of weeks I've been playing Titan Quest.
The quality of the art in the game is just amazing.

While playing and enjoying the game I started thinking about how the
textures and mainly normal maps for the environments were created.

I know there are various ways to create normal maps, but taking into account
the size of the environment and number of textures used for it
I couldn't imagine the artists used high res meshes or even programs like zbrush for the creation of the normal maps.
This just to cut down on development time.
Of course I could be totally wrong and that's why I am posting this thread.

This is just my curiosity and I hope some of the artists will read this thread
and could possibly tell something about their process in creating
their environment textures, even if the process is a little dated.

I figured this would fit into technical talk, apologies if it is too general.

cheers,

B0kkie

[killingpeople]

Hey b0kkie,

From what I remember, Iron Lore used proprietary tools so its pipeline was fairly streamlined and catered well to the artist. Generally speaking, normal maps used in Titan Quest were generated from a black & white bump map. You'd upload your source files into "Art Manager" and the tools would automatically extract everything it needed from the Max and Psd files. It was pretty rad. With a few clicks you could however circumvent the process and use normal maps generated by other means.

The lead game designer for Titan Quest is working on a project called Grim Dawn. They are using the Titan Quest engine for their game.
http://www.grimdawn.com/

The lead engine programmer responsible for most the cool tools had left after the initial release of Titan Quest to work on Natural Selection 2 as their lead programmer: http://www.naturalselection2.com/

[b0kkie]

hi killingpeople,

Thanks for sharing the info and the extra links, I appreciate it.
Must have been quite nice for the artists to have worked with such a complete package.
In essence saving time on tedious stuff and having more time to get good quality art.

Grimdawn seems like an awesome project, I'll be keeping an eye on that one.

[Eric Chadwick]

Not sure if you've done this yet, but the editor ships with the game. Some editor vids here (http://www.titanquest.net/newsletter/291.html), some docs here (http://www.titanquest.net/tq-forum/threads/2667-Titan-Quest-Modding-Guide-101).

Using that, and some of the fan tools (http://www.titanquest.net/tq-forum/forums/63-Tools), you can examine all the assets to see how they were set up. It's a pretty cool toolset.