A large amount of the production work I did toward the end of my time at 8monkey involved creating environment art for Darkest of Days. I created textures for vegetation, set up vegetation lighting, painted terrain masks, and captured & composited panoramas of skies. This first image shows the grass textures I made, which were taken from the prairie reserve a mile from our studio. It also shows the polishing work I did on the environment, including terrain mask painting to blend ground textures and setting up tree lighting that was baked from our image-based lighting.
This image shows a terrain created from real CIS data to generate a height map of the actual Antietam battlefield area from the Civil War, which formed a farmland background scene for the Antietam part of the game.
Since we made the decision to do image-based lighting early on in the project, I took the task of developing a pipeline for high-quality skies. I selected and authorized the purchase of a professional D-SLR camera, fisheye lens, panoramic tripod mount, and panoramic stitching software.
The workflow involved going out to specific locations with an unobstructed horizon, capturing 14 images for each of three angles, and combining the exposures into HDR images of each angle, then compositing the angles into a single 12 megapixel HDR panorama. After that, the images needed to be Photoshopped to remove man-made obstructions like antennas, houses, and other buildings.
The image was then converted to a cube-map for the skybox, and run through a tool which calculated the irradiance maps used for lighting in the Marmoset engine. Then, I took the skybox and “baked” local retinal response into it, so it could be used as an in-game background.