BATTLETECH Urban Warfare Buildings
Urban Warfare brings city combat to the world of BATTLETECH. I was responsible for creating the majority of our building models and materials. During this project I learned a ton about creating modular kits, designing texture atlases, and generating procedural materials. Plus the buildings are a lot of fun to blow up!
Art direction, concept art: Marco Mazzoni
Lighting: Lee Scheinbeim
Vehicles, roads: Zach Whitchurch
Foliage: Zach Hartlage
VFX: Will Avery, Tracey Landau, Dave McCoy
Map design: Connor Monahan, Ryan Burrell, Henry Banks
Technical art: Lee Scheinbeim, Dave McCoy, and Carlos Giraldo
Level artpassing: Zach Hartlage, Zach Whitchurch, and myself
More information on building construction and destruction in this Dev Diary: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/hbs-dev-diary-12-mechs-and-the-city.1193820/
In game screenshot
Our cityscapes needed to have variety but not many unique models or materials. To that end, I designed a texture atlas that allowed the same material to be shared across dozens of buildings.
To save on poly count, most structural details were represented in materials rather than geometry. I used Substance Designer to generate all of our building materials. This Substance converts any black and white heightmap into a Unity-ready material.
I modeled a collection of basic lobby, tower, and roof components in Maya, then assembled them with an internal Houdini tool built by Dave McCoy. This modular approach let us quickly create lots of buildings with a few shared components.
Several of the final building models and materials.
