Hello fellow Polycounters,

My name is Jason Stokes and I've been lurking around here for years. I wanted to share some of the work I've done on GuildWars 2 and also explain some of the process. I love the community here and I've learned quite a bit over the years so I figured I should probably start contributing

I was at ArenaNet for about 8 and a half years working mostly on environment art and prototyping some of the more ambitious areas in GuildWars2. Prototyping was our way of pitching big ideas to the game designers by actually having the environments working in the game engine. It was a lot easier to get buy off on these ideas once people saw them working. This process evolved into a weird hybrid of concepting and production and became an integral part of the development process. I worked closely with Daniel Dociu the art director and often times we would start blocking things in the level based from very loose sketches and then refine the concept simultaneously with the asset creation. Because of this paralleled approach the end result evolves quite a bit from the original idea and usually for the better.

I assembled all of the areas below in our editor and created a lot of the core assets. Many people helped and I'll try and give specific credit where appropriate. Also most of these areas have changed in the final game so if you go searching for any specific vistas you'll be out of luck.

Also most of this work is 3-5 years old so please forgive some of the outdated tech.


here is a video portfolio of some of the finished prototypes.

Jason Stokes GuildWars 2 Environment Art...

This first batch is an early process breakdown of the Charr architecture and city. Here is a Daniel Dociu concept accompanied by some of the photo ref he used for his piece. The photo reference is usually just as valuable as the concept itself and comes in handy when hes not around to answer questions.




A close up of the finished model. Most of the facade detail was created using layered alpha which is expensive because of the overdraw but is very versatile for creating new ornaments and details on other parts of the building.



a quick breakdown of the textures. Again built with modularity in mind so that the textures can be used throughout the city.



once the materials are defined building variants are quick and easy. usually we would make 3-4 variants per structure.



Another shot of the structure in a test map. Always try and get your assets in the editor as soon as possible even if it's only a grey box for scale. If you're not actually running around and evaluating the prop up close you won't be able to prioritize the assignment correctly.



Here is a quick city layout sketch that Levi Hopkins provided me. He used to be on the prototype team with me before he switched to concept artist so he understands the trenches.



A shot of the DeathSta... I mean Black Citadel Just rough enough to evaluate scale and silhouette.



Blocking in the basic layout based on Levi's sketch



Here I'm just playing with the few buildings that we have and trying to get interesting clusters by intersecting them.



Here I took my current progress into photoshop and concepted where I'd like to take it. I find this process to be very important because it allows you to step away from the 3-D barriers and think of your environment as an illustration. This is the parallel tie between production and concepting that I mentioned earlier.



Now I start implementing some of the elements from the new concept.



more playing with the structures.



Finished prototype ready to show design and get yelled out.





I have a bunch more break downs that I'll try and post throughout the week. Hope this is of some help.

Sorry to say, but I dont see a single picture. Just the video.

Your images are throwing a 403 error for me when I try to go to them. Maybe try either changing permissions or hosting somewhere other than Dropbox.

EDIT: Hmm, looks like about half are showing up now.

fixed the image problem. Thanks for the heads up!

I'm going to read into it once I have a minute, but I just wanted to say that this is soo awesome, Jason. Thank you so much for doing this.

You all did stellar work on Guild Wards 2.

Cheers.

Absolutely inspiring. Any way we can see more breakdowns? Seeing how you went about making these things is awesome. Can't get enough!

Great work, wanna see the rest, subscribed!

Hey Jason, awesome work. Lots of super cool looking environments in the game.

One thing I've been curious about since the early betas is how exactly all these unique looking rocks are done shader-wise. They're all over and the lighting on them looks great. (example) Is there some sort of low-res normal map for the overall shape of the stone, overlayed with the tiling detail textures? Or is there some other sort of shader magic at work to get the lighting on all these unique looking rock formations looking accurate?

Originally Posted by Vrav

Hey Jason, awesome work. Lots of super cool looking environments in the game.

One thing I've been curious about since the early betas is how exactly all these unique looking rocks are done shader-wise. They're all over and the lighting on them looks great. (example) Is there some sort of low-res normal map for the overall shape of the stone, overlayed with the tiling detail textures? Or is there some other sort of shader magic at work to get the lighting on all these unique looking rock formations looking accurate?

yes, that's correct except the normal map is usually a 1024 per rock formation. These rocks are generally sculpted in Z-brush and the decimated down to a few thousand tris. If you use Udk, the example Foliage map has a giant rock prop that has a similar material set up.

Originally Posted by futurepoly

yes, that's correct except the normal map is usually a 1024 per rock formation. These rocks are generally sculpted in Z-brush and the decimated down to a few thousand tris. If you use Udk, the example Foliage map has a giant rock prop that has a similar material set up.

Awesome, and yeah I've always really liked that sample rock in the UDK foliage demo. I show it (and GW2 environments) to programmers in hope of persuading them to use such cool shaders.

I've noticed GW2 is very shader heavy. Another example that comes to mind are the plank bridges in Lion's Arch. They seem to have the base tiling planks texture, then on some the blue paint mask, as well as the barnacles here and there, and what appear to be decals (those flat planks, broken boards and such). You guys get lots of variety out of your environment art, though I wonder just how many things use a generic parametric env shader for stuff like that, or if there are a lot of unique shaders for different surfaces. You don't have to spoil what you guys have done if it's tmi, but it is quite fun to observe in the game!

Thanks for the post and the Maya screenshot this a a dream come true for me.

that's pretty awesome...I love these development threads...Is GuildWars 2 using its own proprietary game engine or is it one of the major engines like udk?

Awesome! Cheers for the breakdown.

Originally Posted by Notes

that's pretty awesome...I love these development threads...Is GuildWars 2 using its own proprietary game engine or is it one of the major engines like udk?

Off Wikipedia

"Guild Wars 2 uses a heavily modified version of the proprietary game engine developed for Guild Wars by ArenaNet"

Neat, thanks!! I like how organic the process is.

Thanks for the art dump and process insight <3
[I still need to get my ass out to Seattle and go to FuturePoly. One of these days!]

You mention that the facades use planes early on in the write-up. Did that carry through to the end product?

I don't see any wavy normals which I think could really help. Do some cloud render filters in photershop and then max the intensity in crazybump to get thhose big shapes. Word it up.

Great work! I have a thousand inspiration shots from the game in my inspiration folder. Gooooooood stuff!

i like

Nicely done. But i have a question.

You guys photosourced textures or sculpted them or both. I mean for enviroments of course.
As I've been running around, most of texture looks like they were taken from photos (some of them might be even in my library, but I have no intrest investigating it that much ).

Just curious, how you guys apporched it.

Inspiration levels fully recharged thanks Jason, this was an amazing insight!

AMAZING!!!!

Really great job documenting the process. Nice to see more in depth posts like this on game releases.

Wow, just this morning I was thinking about cold messaging any Anet environment artists I could find, just to ask nicely if thy should share any insights into the workflow on GuildWars2!

Now I don't even need to! ha!

Looking forward to more! can you tell us how big the prototype team was? was there multiple teams working on establishing different environments?