Star Wars: Battlefront - Tatooine - Jundland Wastes
I remember sitting in that room at the old Dice office at Slussen Stockholm with the other planet owners deciding which planet we each would be responsible for. Tatooine was at the very top of my list. When it was finally decided i couldn't have been more excited.
Coming from Sweden. Deserts have always felt exotic and fascinating to me. I love the variation in shape and color and there’s a whole range of interesting geology you can work with. I love how the bare scorched landscape reveals every feature and opens up for endless vistas.
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Out of all the different parts of Tatooine we wanted to faithfully portray the desolate eroded landscape you see in classic Tatooine shots from Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope™ and the walk to Jabba’s Palace in Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi™ was the part I looked most forward to.
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On our extensive photo scanning trips for the game we made sure to get the photogrammetry content from the actual filming location in Death Valley. The LIDAR I used to create the backdrop and terrain landscape was also captured from the same movie location. It required quite the research to match up everything like finding the position of Jabba's Palace.
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In the LIDAR data I made sure to remove all Lighting, hue shifts and heightfield point cloud artifacts and lines without loosing any detail. The imagery data was thereafter separated into material masks and the color extracted so that only the actual tints remained and could be applied to all geology in their respective shaders. All materials are carefully calibrated and delighted for PBR. We had an extensive pre production phase setting up workflows where we were only four artists working on the natural parts of the game. Pontus Ryman (Hoth), Andrew Hamilton (Endor), Petter Sköld (Sullust) and me (Tatooine)
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When we were about to ramp up for production we had a similar meeting like the first but this time it was the Level Artists turn to choose. I remember well when Tim Mcleod said he wanted to join me working on Tatooine. I couldn't have wished for a better partner to share this journey. Coming from Australia he was practically born in the desert. We split up the work between us, Tim focusing on but not limited to cliffs, rocks, architecture and interiors, and me on terrain, backdrop, shaders and exteriors. We made a super team. Tim's contribution to the game was superb. Clean and versitile meshes, well optimized and gameplay friendly, Great sense for gameplay and Level Design. His architectural and interior work turned out fantastic. The two of us created all the 7 original Tatooine maps and all its nature content.
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All components were put together in the powerful Frostbite engine. And it was a delight to see the engine working the content. We managed to optimize the content so that we could not only render the detail close up with mesh displacement on every geological component, terrain, rocks, cliffs but also loading the 1ppm 8x8km terrain heightfield in memory with full detail all the way to the horizon and rendering the 100km long landscape within its drawdistance. All at 60 fps! A big shoutout to Robert Kihl our Rendering Engineer for his fantastic work helping us push the engines limits. He was sitting with the environment team during both pre production and production. True source of inspiration.
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What I hope players will feel when stepping into the digital landscape is the feeling you are stepping into the world of Star Wars, the atmosphere of being in the scorching desert with its intense heat shimmer, native desert creatures and equipment covered in dust. These are the things we experienced on our trips and have tried to recreate in the game.
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A lot of the content in this presentation is from our visit and presentation at GDC 2016.
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TAGS
Star Wars: Battlefront Tatooine Beggar's Canyon Dune Sea Exchange Jawa Refuge Jundland Wastes Raider Camp Rebel Depot DLC EA Electronic Arts DICE Frostbite Level Art Environment Art PC PlayStation 4 Xbox one XB1 PS4 Sand Crawler Jabba's Palace Rebel Transport Rebel Base Tusken Raider Village Imperial Transport Death Valley Luke Skywalker Lars Homestead Mos Eisley Light sabre cave Jawa Star Destroyer X-wing Tie Fighter LIDAR Outer Rim Twin suns Artist Palette Lucasfilm Lucasarts GDC
The cave where Luke Skywalker builds his green lightsabre he uses in Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi™
Terrain materials and objects captured on the actual film location in Death Valley.
LIDAR terrain and backdrop from the actual filming location.
Terrain shaders setup with mask breakup.
Materials are carefully delighted and calibrated for PBR.
Object shaders setup to blend with terrain.
A lot of the detail comes from terrain displacement rather than placed objects.
Mesh displacement on all terrain materials, rocks and cliffs.
Color tint derived from imagery data.
Hidden openings througout the descolate landscape reveals hidden underground cave networks and settlements.
Terrain masks also derived from Imagery data.
Vegetation asset creation and shader setup
Adaptive detail tiling on rock assets.
Slope angle decides the structure of the dry ground.
Actual physical distance and scale.
Rock shaders change color and detail depending on where they are placed in the world.
Worldmachine is used to blend gameplay area with LIDAR terrain.
Damaged concrete shader is setup to mask in dust, puddles and cracks.
The road to Jabbas palace.
Level overview.
Level overview.
Level overview.
Level overview.
100km LIDAR backdrop mesh.
All content captured on site using photogrametry.
Game/movie comparison.
8x8 km terrain heightfield. Height, color and masks derived from LIDAR-data.
Seamless transition between terrain and backdrop.
Rock shaders setup to blend terrain normals and large scale color variation.
Terrain shader masking using slope angle.
Terrain shader with scatter meshes.
Terrain mask breakup.
Rockshader with adaptive detail tiling.
Terrain blending.
Mesh displacement on terrain, rocks and cliffs.
Scan-man.
Visiting the original Star Wars filming locations to capture the content for the game was a true adventure and a lifetime memory.