Massive Entertainment Lead Artist Rodrigo Cortes gave us insight on the art development of World in Conflict, a real time tactical game with a heck of a lot of artistic details that flesh out the environment and the combat during gameplay. For all you console gamers out there, keep an eye out for this PC title as it gets ported to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in the fall.

Q: World in Conflict has been noted for its advanced graphic quality. Can you tell us a bit about your role in the project?

A: I was responsible for managing the art team, which in turn was responsible for all of the buildings, props, effects and units in the game as well as all the single-player specific story events.

Q: Where did inspiration for the art style come from?

A: We worked a lot with contrast between the idyllic environments and the destructive forces of war. It’s all based on realism, or rather stylized realism, which almost makes every screenshot look like a painted picture. This is very different from most war games, where everything’s usually ruined from the very beginning and revolves around militaristic targets instead of people’s homes.

Q: What was it like working with the advanced Masstech engine? How did it differ from your work with other engines?

A: Unlike working with other licensed engines, the Masstech engine was tailored for our needs. In the process of making the game, we came up with new ideas all the time, and having the in-house tech team ensured that we could carry out these ideas. These tailored in-house tools enabled a very streamlined art pipeline, which was all due to the close collaboration between the art team and tech team.

Q: How did scalable and dynamic graphics improve the art? Were there any challenges that your team faced?

A: It was a necessity to have scalable and dynamic graphics in order to maintain the idea of having a living battlefield that you can see from grass-root level all the way to the horizon. World in Conflict was designed not only to have an insane amount of detail with lots of stuff going on at the same time, but also to have everything completely destructible. We worked extensively with levels of detail and came up with a couple of solutions that I think are unique for World in Conflict. These were probably some of the biggest challenges for the art team.

Q: How many team members did you have and how did you manage the art process?

A: At the end of production we had 24 people in the art team, including 3D artists, texture artists, animators, concept artists and GUI artists. One of my most important rules of thumb was to give each team member responsibility for specific areas of production. This made them care much more about their work and motivated them to do their best.

Q: What are you most proud of from World in Conflict?

A: I’m probably most proud over all the tiny little details that hardly anyone notices but everyone would miss if it wasn’t there, like the physics-based helicopter crashes and the randomized variations on the different unit models. I’m also really proud of the localized damage on the units, especially the tank where you can see that the engine is running underneath the armor.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Art Interviews, PEOPLE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.