Here’s some artwork from one of my first titles. You’ll see a bunch of what look like satellite imagery. These were overhead maps that the player would use to choose their starting location. Some were 8 miles by 8 miles if I remember correctly. Others were a little closer up, like 1 mile by 1 mile. These were really fun to build. I’d receive an ugly looking snapshot of the world like this:

What I'd Get

What I'd Make From That

Then I’d take it into Max, get the heightmap for the level, displace it, light it, and then use that for a shade map. Then I’d take the whole thing into Photoshop and start painting it up. Sometimes I’d do it up and make a spec map on the water or bump maps on the forests and rerender it.

Then there is a sheet of tile textures that I did for a winter level. The system for this game was actually kind of cool, and was a precursor to systems I would use years later on Spiderman 3. It was a tiling and instancing system that allowed the world to be miles across. So those little square textures would each be one quad on the map. Then using a tile builder, a roughly 16×16 quad tile would be populated with trees and other entities. Then that tile would be arranged on the world map.

The upside of this is a huge world. The downside is that the world was quite repetitive. Anyhow, it was a hunting game. It was 1999. People liked this kind of thing.

Last there were a few low poly models in there too. I show those just to say hey, I made a bunny in under 100 triangles. Those models were even rigged and animated. I’ll see if I can dig it up, but I have a sick bunny hopping loop that this portfolio is sorely lacking.

***UPDATE***

The bunnyhop is here.