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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 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 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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