Atriarch Developer Comments

Visual Art Department Update by MO, Lead Artist (March 28, 2002)

Hi everyone, My name is Matt or as most of you know me MO. I am Atriarch's lead artist, which to the layman means I'm in charge of all the graphics production for the game. Everything from concept art to models to textures to animation.

Currently I have been working on terrain. I have found from the very beginning that the biggest challenge in creating terrain is scale, especially when there's something more unique than rolling foothills or mountains. The terrain always looks different to me after we put it in the engine to test. Something I found to be helpful when creating terrain is to put in objects that are of different size but give me a sense of scale to the characters, like buildings for example. At first I was putting the characters in for scale but that was useless because they just become a little speck.

Arc is always improving the state of the engine itself which allows me to be more generous with polygons than I was when I created Atriarch's very first piece of terrain. Being able to use more polys helps my job tremendously, it keeps you from having to be clever with the use of polygons. Mountains can have more wrinkles, caves can be crooked and curved, ledges and paths can be beveled, it just opens the door to create much more interesting terrain.

Creating textures for terrain is really fun, especially if you have a good library of images to work from. I think my wife believes I'm crazy every time we go hiking or are on vacation and I have access to the camera. I'm constantly trying to add to my image library. She always catches me bent over a rock, snapping a picture.

I wanna thank all our fans for keeping the faith and being so patient with us while we try to create this monster.
MO
lead artist

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