Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/26447
n n n n Gaming the environmental morphing that results from the player’s choices—“that pushes the number up even more,” he says. Te two continents are a tour-de-force showcase for the power of Autodesk’s Soft- image. “Our [Softimage] XSI pipeline allows us to have a locked-down asset that we can open to edit, view, or just retrieve to view the mesh. Te source-control aspect of this system is extremely useful,” says senior art manager Mark Smart. For example, the system prevents multiple saves of an item with different names, which in the past had caused confusion. In addition to Softimage, Lionhead used Pixologic’s ZBrush and Adobe’s Photoshop for detailing and texturing the imagery. “Te big- gest challenge we faced with the environment was managing texture memory. Te environ- ments are very big, and texture space at a pre- mium,” says Smart. Te vast majority of the sets use texture pages that seamlessly tile. Te one drawback with tiling textures, however, is the repetition of familiar themes in the texture itself. To solve this problem, the group created and mapped variants to specific polygons. Adding to the texturing challenges, every setting had to adhere to its own visual theme and palette. “For example, we wanted the vil- lage of Brightwall to have a cozy, friendly feel,” and the air lie woolen with factory smoke. Called environmental morphs, these transfor- mations serve as an external manifestation of the player’s spiritual decay or growth—which is not always as clear-cut as it seems. Yes, there’s gold in them hills, as the saying goes, but that gold can also be used to feed the starving. “One of our biggest goals during develop- ment was to ensure that players notice when their world changes,” says Green. “Tere were many global changes in Fable II that some play- ers didn’t pay any attention to or just weren’t aware of. So, we made a rule that any region morphs in Fable III should be as impactful as possible.” One of the game’s crucial plot points pivots on an environmental morphing of a picturesque town called Millfields, formerly known as Bower Lake in Fable II. Skirted by mountains, and rich with lush trees and green fields, Millfields is home to Albion’s nobil- ity. As king, the player must decide whether to drain and mine the beautiful Bower Lake nestled at its heart. “We had an idea fairly early on what chang- es we could make, specifically draining the region’s iconic lake and strip-mining the min- erals beneath it. Bower Lake is probably one of the top fan-favorite regions, so this change alone had to have some shock value when on changes to the height fields, or height maps (which generate terrain elevations texturally rather than polygonally), when modifying a region because they’re the easiest and cheap- est changes to make,” explains Green. “For Millfields, we immediately removed the water plane from the lake and started sculpting it out according to the demands of the story. We kept the existing palette of textures from the vanilla (unspoiled) region until we were happy with the layout. Ten, we duplicated the exist- ing palette of textures—or themes, as we call them—and applied them onto the alterna- tive scenario. We could then start swapping textures in our themes very quickly; that is, change the textures underneath grass meshes, increase the density of foliage, and so forth.” Lionhead’s FableEd contains several tools that make region morphs fairly easy to create and edit. Because the majority of the regions in Fable III are built using height maps, dupli- cating a level would normally mean that any bug fixes in the unspoiled regions wouldn’t be seen in the morphed terrains. FableEd, however, allows height fields to inherit from one another, so the artists can flood or drain a region and still make changes in the vanilla region that will also propagate across all the other possible environmental transforma- tions—even if significant changes were made to the alternative scenario. “Without this one feature,” says Green, “we’d have all gone mad long ago trying to duplicate any fixes across all the variants.” The player fights off the king’s army, which was animated using Softimage. says Smart. “Te textures reflected that, sport- ing warm, tonal colors, with prominent yellows and oranges. For the underground tombs, the gray stone is laced with blues and green that hint at underground moss or lichen.” Environmental Morphing After coronation, if the player rules for the sake of wealth and industry, the forests will disappear, the verdant valleys turn to muddy strip mines, the rivers run like an open sore, 26 January/February 2011 players get to see it in-game,” says Green. “Hopefully, the financial reward for mining the region is worth the devastating loss of such natural beauty.” For other region changes, the artists often need concept artwork to get some idea of the overall theme, but for Millfields, it was easier to take screen shots of the town and despoil it in Photoshop. From that point, they used the in-house level editor, called FableEd, to inflict aesthetic damage. “Each level designer will tend to focus first After changing the height maps, artists began modifying the polygonal meshes. “Be- cause we duplicated the region, it will still retain all the [geometry] from the vanilla sce- nario, so it’s here that we would make changes to any buildings or structures, such as perma- nently damaging or gutting houses, break- ing bridges, and so forth. For Millfields, we reused existing assets from one of our other regions because draining the lake alone wasn’t enough to shock the player,” says Green. “We imported crane assets, mine-cart tracks, and various other industrial structures, and laid those around the region. If we did need new assets, we used [Google’s] SketchUp or anoth- er 3D package to create a ‘white box’ of the new mesh.” If the white-box object worked within the scene, the art department would import it into Softimage and ZBrush to mod- el and paint the final asset. Once Bower Lake and the surrounding ar- eas had been remodeled, artists used FableEd’s environment theme editor to change the am- bience of the region across the day-night cycle. Te editor controls such attributes as sun posi-