Osgiliath - Broken Room Ramp with Fell Beast

Here is probably my favorite moment from my work in Return of the King. The Fell Beast swooping overhead as you emerge from inside the ruins to the stormy roof is pretty exhiliating indeed.

Osgiliath - Rooftop Ruins Detail

The rooftop is littered with a lot of broken floors and collasped architecture. A lot of attention was also paid to the damaged profile of the walls. I modeled them as tilable sections to speed up my process.

From here you can see the precarious tower in the back. I wanted to make it look like the only reason why it's staying it is because of a few bent wooden beams, and that it could come down any moment.

Again, the profile of the broken columns was arranged to visually dissect the sky in an interesting way.

Osgiliath - Rooftop Ruins

One of the nice things about Osgiliath is that, you can see a vista of much of the rooftop level before you actually get to it. Here you can see a whole section of the rooftop ruins which I modelled from before you get there. You eventually reach the tower in the background and descend through to the sewers.

Osgiliath - Collasping Tower

On top of building much of the terrain in Osgliath I was also tasked with modeling the animated terrain. This collapsing tower had to be built as 3 separate assets: intact, breaking, and broken. The "breaking" version is a combination of 5 pieces that fit together, and has to be under a pretty tight budget. It was up to me as well to determine how such a tower would logically break apart due to a catapult attack.

The whole set of assets for this tower was made ine one day.

Osgiliath - Broken Room Ramp

This image shows the ramp inside the Broken Room leading up to the roof. I paid extra attention to the broken wall in the image here because I knew the camera would be looking upwards into the sky and I wanted the shape and profile of that wall to have the effect of a fallen, heroic statue.

I cut out extra subdivions along the horizontal lines of stonework in the texture and pulled out the vertices out so the resulting narrow face would catch the light and add a level of depth to the geometry.

Osgiliath - Broken Room

This is the broken city of Gondor. The whole level essentially consists of various Gondorian ruins, and the player travels in, under and on top of them.

This level was basically built from scratch in a matter of two weeks with about 4 or 5 artists. We were given a "block world" in which the designers have roughed out purely to fit pathing purposes.

This room was given to me as a grey cube with a ramp, and I had to model and texture it as I imaged it (no concept art) in 2 days. I focused most of the geometry budget on cutting the stonework out according to the texture, and paid extra attention to any profile against the sky.

Isengard

Isengard was a big level with 3 distinct areas and looks to it. The level snakes through forests, then through a rocky canyon and then out to a clearing of burnt trees. I was called in to firefight the entire rocky section. When I received the model it was essential a bare trench, and I only had a few days to push the look as far as possible before they wrapped it no matter what.

I tried to recreate the desolate, hostile and cold look of rocky regions in the film by strategically using only a handful of different rock textures. The textures were UV'ed onto the flat smooth polygons in a way that gave the simple base geometry the look of complex, sharp and teethy terrain.

Isengard

The rock face you see here is essentially flat; I focused the tesselation on the profile to give it the illusion of much more complex geometry. Most of the look is achieved by strategic UV-ing of textures already existing in the level and vertex-alpha overlays.

I placed the two dead trees in the background too to help dissect the sky. They paralex nicely when the player turns the corner around the rockface.

Birds Eye View of Tower

This view shows more of the intricate floor, which the final camera does not really show. Below is theh specific design called out for the details.

The Tower Model

Here is the view of the entire 6-sided tower. The concept art below shows the original design by Lao Chi-wai.

Frontend

This is the 3D environment for the level-select screen in the game. I modelled and textured the scene as my first assignment at EA.

I was responsible for modeling and texturing the scene with only a couple of concept drawings as input. Ultimately, I was also responsible for figuring out how to create the scene in a manner that a scripter could use an an interactive menu. Thus, it was as much a technical modeling exercise as an aesthetic challenge.

Christian Scheurer, our art director, was so happy with the result that he has repeatedly said the frontend was his favourite part of the game.

Concept by Lao Chi-wai, and lighting design by Dave Blizzard.