The Star Wars: The Old Republic site has been updated with the next in a series of articles showing off the 'behind the scenes' work accomplished by the development team. This time,Senior Environment Artist Robby Lamb shows how the team creates and polishes the environments in SWTOR. At the end of the description, there's a community Q&A about the same topic.
Apart from working on environment items like walls, another polish task is the re-lighting and adding of props to an area to help tell the visual story better. Appropriate lighting and props can quickly and visually tell you that an area is, for example, seedy as opposed to crime-free.
This is important to the environment artists as well as the writers and designers whose story we are telling through art. Often we are given a description of an area that needs to be built out; let’s take a computer lab as an example. With a few NPCs placed inside, we might start with a computer lab in the simplest terms. However later in development a more detailed description may evolve – describing this area as a computer lab, locked from the outside, with a hacker trapped inside who is enslaved to the Empire. Based on this description we will go back into an area and address it by either building new or reusing more appropriate assets to fit the scene, relighting the area, as well as adjusting the environment settings such as fog depth or color.
Read more on the Star Wars: The Old Republic site.
