Unlike many of it's
fantasy-based kin, The
Chronicles of Spellborn continues along its defined
development path for a Q4 2007 release. While the release may still be
a few months away, especially for the U.S. crowd, the employees at TCoS
aren't taking any time off. Ten Ton Hammer recently received a copy of
their latest development art journal, which depicts some of the ongoing
work that's being done to polish the dark fantasy game. With a prologue
by Community Manager Banshee, the main crux of the article is penned by
TCoS artist Bert-Jan de Weerd. Enjoy!

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Hello all!
It’s about time I give you some updates about the
Art department again. Lot’s of stuff has happened, which for
me was mostly excel and bugfixing… and by taking one look on
my bugzilla I still have a long list to go. But, nothing I
can’t manage of course. Smile Anyway, bugs fixing is probably
the least interesting thing to talk about. Showing you guys some sneak
peaks on new stuff probably isn’t.



So you remember the High Houses and the concept of High House Torque?
You do? Good. And for those who haven't seen it yet, you can read all
about it href="http://www.tcos.com/sbforum/viewtopic.php?p=172816">here.



One of the environment artists, Erik Bakker, has been working on it for
a while now and the High House Torque is nearing completion. Erik has
been doing the models as well as hand painting the textures. (More
about modeling and texturing can be found href="http://www.tcos.com/sbforum/viewtopic.php?t=11251">here.)



About that High House
Torque…

by Bert-Jan de Weerd



The basic model of the High House was fairly easy since, as described
in the
concept art blog, the building needed to reflect a certain
characteristic and a more robust yet simple architecture suited the
characteristic of Torque just fine. So we started of with a simple
mockup of the building. Using mockups is a great way of testing a
design. A mockup is a very, very simple version of a design and mainly
consists out of cubes and cylinders and basic colored materials (in our
case… one of the default materials is a very, very bright
pink texture. If you don't already have a headache, you're bound to
have one real fast). We then placed that mockup in the environment to
check if it would fit. We can see the composition of the area; does it
fit within the rest of the environment and if not, what do we need to
tweak to improve it? But we can also play test it. For example we can
check if it's not too big or too small, if the chairs are not too steep
or too long, and do all the gameplay elements work out as intended? In
the case of Torque, it all worked out just fine.



So Erik could then start working on the detailed mesh of the building
using the mockup as a guideline for all the parameters. It resulted in
this:

There, that works out just fine. Of course it misses all the details
such as small lights and ornaments etc. But those are separate assets
which we'll be adding in the Level Editor (more on that later). So, now
that we're all happy with where this is heading Erik could start
painting some materials for this big grey block (lets be honest, grey
is kinda dull). But, no worries, things like this are in good hands
with Erik, as you can see below:

To be honest, I'm more then pleased with textures like this. These High
Houses are becoming my favorite Art assets of the game more and more,
each day there's cool new stuff added to them. So check out where it's
actually heading to:

Of course this isn't the finished building. You're still missing some
materials and it's not placed in the level editor so there's no details
and no lighting and no environment… but hey, I gotta keep
you curious don't I?



Till next time!

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