Croft Manor Art Blog

Tomb Raider: Legend was one of the first games that I played on the new-at-the-time Xbox360. To me, one of the most striking levels of the game was the Croft Manor. Not only did you get to see where Lara spent all of her time away from exploration, but it was also some of the most stunning artwork on the console. Even her home was filled with mysterious puzzles and a web of interactivity. Now, imagine my excitement when I was told that I'd get to work on the latest vision of Lara's mansion... and then blow it up.

Rebuilding the Croft Manor for Tomb Raider: Underworld was an interesting task for many reasons. Her family home is an iconic, recognizable piece of architecture. TR fans are quite familiar with it through a number of games as well as the movies. With this title taking full advantage of the technologies available on the next-gen consoles I wanted to really make some memorable artistic changes. At the same time I had to be very careful not to stray too far from what people expected to see.

I started rebuilding the mansion pillar by pillar and wall by wall while using the geometry from Tomb Raider: Legend as a starting point for scale and reference. Along with a material artist with whom I kept close communication, I began to rebuild the foundation of Lara's main foyer. After deciding on recurring motifs, colors, and textures I applied these themes to create the foyer, the main playable room in Croft Manor, and later to Lara's bedroom and the hallway attaching it to the main foyer.

One notable exception in my process that differs from just about every other unit in Tomb Raider: Underworld is the fact that the mansion already had a designated layout before any game designer ever began to work on it. Additionally, the mansion was going to be used as a tutorial for the player, keeping the puzzles and complexity of structure to a minimum. Because of these factors, I did not work extensively with the level designer and this allowed me to concentrate heavily on the aesthetic appeal. Later, the cinematic team decided to tell a number of important parts of the story in this area and I found myself working more closely with them than I had in the past. The changes they requested turned out to be much easier to make than for those of the design/gameplay department with all of their intricate and grand ideas.

With the main structure of the mansion built I came to the really fun part. Helped along by some amazing, custom-built tools for destruction, I began tearing apart the geometry of the foyer. Imagining the sources and locations of the explosions that would rip this large room apart, I laid down pieces of the forensic storytelling that will allow the player to really become immersed in the environment. Using dark, saturated lighting, heavy fire, smoke, ash, and rain effects as well as layers upon layers of rough, charred textures the mansion really came to life.

Unfortunately, this process also created a large technological hurdle. All of us contributing to the brilliant atmosphere of Croft Manor had to work extremely efficiently in order to keep adding all of these detailed layers. This unit was the largest in memory on the console. Rather than rip out these pieces that added so much to the now moody, high tension, and intensely interesting environment, we raced to be the most economical we could. By developing tricks for dealing with typically power intensive processes, I really feel that we were able to push a whole lot of character into this space while making a very small footprint in the overall memory allocation.

In the end I believe we created a memorable and spectacular destruction of Lara's family home. I hope everyone that plays it has a truly immersive experience.

Jeremy French

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Only Days To Go!

It’s great to see so much excitement out there over the demo we released for Tomb Raider: Underworld. So many positive posts everywhere, and this is only a teaser! It’s also good to hear people saying that it’s taking them anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours to finish, to varying degrees of completeness. This is what I was trying to say before when asked how long the game would be. I sometimes get busted for dodging answers, but often it’s because there is no simple answer. With a stretch of demo gameplay that’s just a taste in the grand scheme of the game, with this much playtime variation, how can I give a number for how long the whole game will last? To answer that, I really wanted to wait for you all to play some and help me with the math.

Scribbling on the back of an envelope here…the demo covers less than a fifth of the Thailand area, and much less than a fifth of the playtime given that there are no ancient device puzzles to figure out in the demo. And given how small an area the demo is compared to the entire game, using the 20-to-120 minute metric, that means the whole game is easily many times longer than Legend, depending on how much you rush through it without exploring and how long you struggle with the puzzles (or use Field Assistance). Thorough people could easily spend 50-60 hours playing through and finding all the hidden rewards and such. But I really can't be more specific because there is so much variation of playtime for Tomb Raider: Underworld.

As excited as we are about the demo, we are even more excited about the game. With as much as we managed to show in this little stretch of Thailand, there were so many major aspects of the game that you haven’t played. Loads of puzzles, from small local challenges to huge ancient set pieces are in store. Exploring the environment, finding the elements you need to understand, manipulate, and master to get ahead, in dramatically different environments around the world. Encountering many more enemies protecting even deeper truths about the ancient past. (Some of you already got a head start on this, finding ways to get to the floor of Bhogavati even though the demo was supposed to end before you met the naga…congratulations! We knew you would figure out a way eventually – that’s why we put invisible walls in the hallways below…)

I know it’s hard to wait – it’s hard for us, too, because we want to see everyone play the whole game and get answers to long held questions – but the time will fly by, you’ll see. It's only a week away!

Cheers,
-Eric

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Creating the Environmental Artwork for Mexico (By Patrick Sirk)

The Mexico level in Tomb Raider: Underworld was our test bed scenario. In preproduction, we built a medium sized area that was to include dense jungle and overgrown ruins, next gen material and lighting techniques, combat, motorcycle gameplay and of course, Lara’s fluid movement over a variety of surfaces.

The pre production exercise was good and we proved out much of our production technique however, as the environment art lead, I quickly realized that to reconstruct the Mayan ruins themselves, we would have to travel to Mexico and do extensive reference photography.

My purpose was twofold; first I wanted the player to feel like they were really in Southern Mexico, exploring a believable “lost Mayan temple”. To achieve this, attention to architectural accuracy was key. The Mayan world has become somewhat iconic and we have all seen countless images of their civilization in the media. I felt that if we did not represent the Mayan world accurately, our audience could feel cheated.

Second, I wanted to provide the artists with a vast array of digital photographs that they could manipulate in photoshop to create textures for the game. We shot in two styles. The first was wide angle, establishing shots. The second was up close detail of the Mayan stonework and carvings. All told, we returned with 10,000 hi resolution images from the Yucatan Peninsula. The actual game level takes place further south but the condition of the ruins in the Yucatan is much better. Our strategy was to build the ruins fairly clean and then decay them through next gen material techniques. This way, the realism of the architecture could always be recognized under the layers of dirt, moss and vegetation.

So, I and fellow artist, Scott Anderson, flew down to Mexico for 12 days. We arrived in Merida and then headed south in a little rented car. I expected a nice, Toyota Landcruiser but it seems that the production department felt that we should go more economically. I immediately felt cheated but now I realize that they were just looking out for us. Had I had the Landcruiser, I would have tried to take it to the most remote, extreme areas of the Yucatan. In fact, I still dream of doing this some day. I really fell in love with this part of the world, especially the remote interior. There is a certain old world simplicity and charm that immediately seduces you.

In any case, our first site was Uxmal (pronounced, ooshmal). I highly recommend visiting this ancient city. Some fantastic pyramids and courtyards will provide a great day of leisure exploration.

We tried to enter the site with our tripods but were immediately stopped by guards. Turns out we needed a tripod permit for about $3,000. Sheesh! So for the remainder of the trip, we shot at a high f-stop and bumped up the “ISO” value when needed. The pictures turned out just fine. When playing Mexico, look for the large temple with the broken “windows” facade. This temple is based specifically on architecture found at Uxmal.

We spent about 4 days exploring the ruins around Uxmal and on the 4th day, we decided to become adventurous. A remote ruin shown on the map deep in the heart of the Yucatan piqued our interest. It was about 100 miles distant and the map showed roads leading to it so what the heck, off we went.

The trip began fairly well but every time we arrived at a little village, we became lost and stress levels climbed because it was extremely difficult to find your way back on to the main road. You would figure that a main street would just flow through the town but not a chance. I must have looked like the ultimate gringo tourist. Twice I drove down a street and I did not need to speak Spanish to clearly understand what was being shouted at me, “YOU’RE DRIVING THE WRONG WAY!”

The stress levels immediately dropped once we were back in the countryside. The lush greens and warm humid air gave us courage for the next village. At last we arrived at the remote ruins, high in the hill country of the Yucatan. Not a soul around, not even a caretaker! But clearly a sign stated, “No entrance past 5” and it was 5:30 and still plenty of daylight. Although I had visions of Federales hauling us off for “looting”, we just could not help ourselves. To have the entire site to ourselves was just too good to pass up so in we went.

The site provided some excellent images of unrestored Mayan architecture. The late afternoon sun made some of the shots almost magical. We poked around a bit and then we noticed on a jungled hillside nearby, a Mayan Temple poking out. It looked so exotic, as if discovered for the first time. Both of us were enthralled. We had to make it up there. A really rough dirt road seemed to lead in that direction and throwing reason aside, we climbed into the Ford Escort and began the ascent.

Within minutes, I became stuck and now my priority was getting the car the hell out before a park official would bust us. And then we heard it. A motorcycle was approaching! You could just imagine the scenarios I was painting in my mind (Midnight Express, Papillion, to name a few).

Around the bend rode a man. Scott yelled “GUN!” and I whispered, “Holy shit”. This guy had a huge rifle strapped to his back. He approached on the bike, looked at us briefly and continued on down the road, his son riding on the back.

Scott and I laughed, got the car unstuck and drove back. On the way down, we noticed many men hiking towards the hills with rifles on their backs. We both agreed; it was awesome that there were still places in the world where men would go hunting in the evening to feed their families. The rest of the Mexico trip went without a hitch but nothing was really as memorable as this day.

Patrick

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How to Survive a Sinking Ship (By Simon Craghead)

As an environment artist at Crystal Dynamics, my job is to build the world that the player explores and interacts with. There are many considerations that go into creating a fun video game environment. Some of the them are technical, some are more artistic, while others focus on the game play or the story. All of these elements are vital to the player's enjoyment of the finished game, which is why game development is a very collaborative process.

One of the fun aspects of working in the games industry is that things are changing all the time. Technology and tools are constantly evolving and so are the expectations of gamers. Often, we set creative goals at the beginning of a project, not knowing exactly how, or even if, we can achieve them. This is a really exciting element of making games. On Tomb Raider: Underworld, one of these challenges involved a sequence where Lara escapes from a sinking ship.

The creative brief was something like this: after rescuing her friends from a burning mansion, battling the kraken (a giant octopus,) and narrowly escaping a watery grave, Lara finds herself surrounded by lethal mercenaries on a freighter in the middle of the Mediterranean. Pursuing a relic stolen from her earlier in the level, she blasts her way to the lower decks of the ship where she meets some familiar faces and has a few shocking revelations. Oh... and the ship sinks.

Basically, at the end of level one we wanted to put Lara in an exciting “action movie” situation where things keep progressing from bad to worse, forcing the player to be creative and to use the environment in unexpected ways. Escaping from a sinking ship was a fun way to do this and while putting Lara in a new setting for a Tomb Raider game.

Although the team was excited about the concept for this sequence, it was almost cut from the game several times because no one was actually sure if we could technically pull it off.

A big part of the challenge was that our game engine had never really been used to do something like this. To make it work, we would need to turn a large section of the ship interior into a dynamic object and fill it with smaller objects that would tumble around as the ship starts sinking.

We’d had large moving objects in our environments before, but never a large moving object that actually was the environment. From a technical standpoint, the biggest hurdle would be ensuring that the player model and the game camera played nicely with the environment as it moved around. To the average game player, this may not sound like a big deal, but I assure you, in "game engine" world, this is the kind of technical challenge that keeps programmers and producers awake at night.

From a design and art standpoint, there were additional challenges. This ship sinking madness happens early in the game, so, while we had to make sure that the excitement factor was high, we also had to ensure that the difficulty level wasn't punishing for a novice player.

The sequence was meant to be fast paced, which meant we would need to quickly establish consistent ways for Lara to climb through vertical spaces in the ship which made clear visual sense to the player.

To help solve this, we used lighting and materials to give the player visual cues about where to go next. We also employed bundles of round pipes as a kind of "visual language" to guide the player.

How obvious should a path be before it becomes boring, and how challenging should a puzzle be before it's totally frustrating? These are questions we're constantly asking ourselves. As artists and designers it’s vital to the players’ enjoyment that we strike a healthy balance between design clarity, game play challenge, and visual realism.

Of course, if we do our jobs well, the player should never even think about any of this. The game should be so engaging that all of our hard work just blends seamlessly together into an exciting, fun player experience, which is something that I feel we've achieved in Tomb Raider: Underworld.

Thanks for reading! I hope you've enjoyed this brief look at some of the challenges that we faced making the latest Lara Croft adventure. Tomb Raider: Underworld has been a huge team effort over several years and the result is a game that I think we're all very proud of.

-Simon

READ MORE - How to Survive a Sinking Ship (By Simon Craghead)

Creating the Environmental Artwork for Coastal Thailand (By Patrick Sirk)

From my Backyard to Bangkok:
Creating the Environment Artwork for “Coastal Thailand”, Tomb Raider Underworld

Patrick Sirk Friday, October 17th, 2008

Hello readers! I was recently asked to write a brief article describing my experience as the Environment Art Director for Underworld. The timing is good because with the intensity of production finally at an end, I have had time to relax and reflect upon the past two years.

With the release of our downloadable demo, “Coastal Thailand”, I thought I’d share our philosophy, goals, experience and adventures while creating the artwork for this beautiful level.

At the outset, I wanted the environments to have a foundation of visual realism. All the details needed to be believable. This meant the architecture, the lighting, the texturing; even the species of plants had to be chosen for their realism. My philosophy is that since many fantastical things are portrayed in Tomb Raider and if those elements of fantasy are represented against a backdrop of realism; then the player’s experience will be more engrossing; the fantasy becomes real.

So, what did this mean for production? An incredible pain in the neck, but well worth it.

I jumped on a plane, digital camera and tripod in hand and off I went. I know what you’re thinking, “this guy has one of the best jobs in the world”. Well that trip turned out to be one of the most grueling 7 days in my life.

The trip started with a malfunctioning computer chip on the plane out of San Francisco. This caused a 6 hour delay in taking off and they had to switch planes with a layover in Tokyo instead of Bangkok. Finally I arrive in Cambodia (where the best ruins are) and with only 3 hours sleep, I meet my guide and off we drive to the fist site. I step out of the air conditioned car into the 105 degree incredibly humid climate and unpack the camera. Of course, heavy condensation immediately forms over the camera body and lens and my heart sinks.

I thought that I had just fried the electronics because the condensation was so extreme. But with some lens wipes, I’m good to go. FYI: trick to preventing this from happening is to keep the camera in a zip lock bag. When the temperature equalizes, unzip the bag and you’ll be fine.

The next 5 days are productive, about 1000 shots a day centered in and around the Angkor Wat complex. But I experienced really bad problems with the heat. I could not drink enough water and I was constantly exhausted. It didn’t help that my internal clock never had a chance to adjust to the 12 hour time difference. But overall, I would do another trip like this in a heartbeat. The results we got from high end photography are evident in the Thailand level. Not only did the artists have excellent reference for the architecture but they created virtually every texture directly from the photographs.

It must be said that all of my effort pales in comparison to the skill and talent of the two primary artists on the Thailand Level; Matt Abbott and Jacob Tai. It was these two that really brought the level to life. I just supplied some ingredients.

After a few months of hard work, the artists had built their geometry and applied the textures and things were looking quite nice, except one primary element was missing: the foliage.

We had always planned on the Thailand level as our deep, lush exotic jungle experience. The artists had built many beautiful plants and we began to populate the environment with literally thousands of plants. And then the frame rate plummeted. This was one of the most frustrating problems encountered while developing Tomb Raider: Underworld.

Were we drawing too many polygons? Were the materials too complex? Were the textures too large? Was our draw distance too far? The engineers could not identify a singular issue that was causing the massive hit in frame rate. We ran tests with a million poly’s and our frame rate was fine. We experimented with overloading the scene with complex materials and still the frame rate was ok. It seemed that a combination of everything was the culprit.

So this meant that we would have to reduce everything and that was not acceptable for me. We wanted hundreds of plants and we could only afford a few. After some experimentation, I found a trick to better use shadow casting. Our performance shot back up and we could include everything I wanted in the scene. That we found a way to keep everything the artists had worked so long and hard on was a huge win and a massive relief.

I hope you enjoy playing Underworld as much as we enjoyed making it.

Cheers for now,
Patrick

READ MORE - Creating the Environmental Artwork for Coastal Thailand (By Patrick Sirk)

Tomb Raider Underworld Demo (By Eric Lindstrom)

So it's official…the Xbox 360 demo for Tomb Raider: Underworld will be released on October 28th! It was a real struggle to pick a location -- they're all so different and cool -- for a number of reasons. We didn’t want to show something too far into the game, both for spoilers and because of the training ramp. We also wanted to provide an area that maximized opportunities to do everything that's new throughout the game, but no single early location could do that. We also wanted to show an area that was unusual for Tomb Raider games, but in the end the Thailand expedition is just so beautiful and full of play opportunities that it really was the only choice. And despite the fact that the demo ends basically at the doorstep of the big central puzzle complex, it still provides more gameplay opportunities and minutes than most other game demos I’ve played.

It starts on the coast, and you get to climb up the cliff face to move inland, but don’t hurry! There are numerous nooks and secret cave areas to discover and spiders to stomp (they're very nasty -- don’t let them jump on you). And here’s a tip: the sharks you'll see aren’t very hungry, so they generally won’t attack you if you don't hurt them first. Try swimming with them as if they were dolphins -- it’s very cool.

Further inland are some pretty aggressive Bengal tigers, and don't forget, if you don't want to kill them, use the tranq gun. While they are sleeping you can watch them breathe, but don't linger too long -- they wake up relatively quickly and not in a good mood. Even further in, observant players will get a glimpse of some of our crypid enemies keeping an eye on you and waiting for the right moment to attack…but you'll have to play the full game to get into that battle. And it's very exciting with them chasing you up the walls and running along the ceiling after you!

The puzzles in the demo are lightweight but show off some of our basic gameplay -- we really couldn’t put in larger puzzles without giving away too much of the game…this is just supposed to be a taste.

Early reviews are just starting to come in, and we've heard from numerous people in the media that this is best Tomb Raider game ever. Check out the demo for Xbox 360 on October 28th, and we're convinced you'll like what you see. But you'll have to play the full game when it comes out in November to get the full Tomb Raider experience, and finally you'll get to see for yourself that this adventure is truly…well, you know what I’m going to say.

Cheers,

Eric

READ MORE - Tomb Raider Underworld Demo (By Eric Lindstrom)

Health System Explained (By Eric Lindstrom)

Tomb Raider: Underworld is in submission! For those who don't know, that means we have submitted final code for approval. Once granted, we're done!

If you don't believe it, take this as proof. I immediately fell ill and have been home sick for over two weeks. First time I've been sick in five years, because this is the first time I could afford to be. A body knows things like this.

I'm in the UK for the official press launch, but because of lead times I don't think anyone will see the results of that right away. So for now, I'll answer a question a lot of people have been asking for a long time: how will the health System work?

You arrive at each new location with full health and no health packs. Each location has health packs you can find -- ancient remedies still lying around (that your mother would never approve of you consuming) or first aid packs in the few places where people are nearby. If you get extremely hurt and don't use a health pack, however, Lara regenerates health slowly on her own till she reaches around 25%. It's frustrating to be so close to death if you have no health packs such that even a stumble can kill you, so in line with What Could Lara Do, if she's strong enough to run and jump, she's strong enough not to die upon stumbling.

Hidden in each location is a hard-to-find Relic. Finding one extends your total health bar by about 17%. Finding all six in the game doubles Lara's max health. Health is displayed in the upper left corner in two ways. A silhouette of Lara is filled with color: green is perfectly health, with yellow, orange, and red for increasing injury. For people who don't perceive color variation well, there is also a vertical bar alongside that shows Lara's health. When you find Relics and increase Lara's total health, a second vertical bar is added and instead of green meaning full health, Lara goes farther into the rainbow toward blue.

There you go. I'll come back in the weeks ahead and answer other questions I've been holding back on till we finished the game.

Cheers,

Eric

READ MORE - Health System Explained (By Eric Lindstrom)