Hello Everyone! I am Zach Hartlage, one of the Environment Artists that worked on bringing the Tropical Biome to life. I have been working at HBS for close to 4 years now. My first project was Shadowrun Hong Kong, and the following SR:HK Extended Edition. My claim-to-fame for BATTLETECH is working on all of the foliage, though I also had a heavy hand in a few of the Main Story missions and general polish on a great deal of all of the procedural maps.
I’ll go ahead and jump right in to my process for conjuring the look and feel of the Tropical Biome. I was instantly excited when given the prompt - maps with lots of foliage? This was going to be my jam.
Immediately I started looking into reference images, that’s always a great start. During my collection and absorption of the reference images, I also started dividing things into various folders so I can easily find specific images when I need them. Things ended up being parsed out into Beach (ocean, sand, cliffsides, rock formations), Jungle (deep forested areas), Tropical Plants, and Waterfalls. Waterfalls were a feature mentioned early on that we wanted to test and see how we could approach them best visually for BATTLETECH.
After parsing through the reference, one of the first potential problem areas that stuck out to me was the idea of doing another “green” forested biome. I wanted to take advantage of the tropical aspects to push it away from our Highland and Lowland sets and get a different look. I tried to achieve this differentiation through shape language as well as color. I spent a bit of time on the palm tree in the set because I knew it would be one of the most defining features of the forest here. I played around with different silhouettes and leaf styles, some of which continued to change even as I got into the modeling process.
With the Biomes, I always do a side by side lineup all of all my main pieces I have decided on, and play with the heights of each piece to make the forest look more full when brought together. Making the forest feel full felt especially important here for the jungle.
Also early in the process, I took a stab at doing a very sketchy look and feel piece.
I was mostly thinking about ground/rock texture, color, and how we could play with distribution of land in this biome to create something different with lots of small islands.
Another thing brought to my attention at the time was that we had not landed on a Special Design Mask. “Design Masks” are what we call the different sections of ground that affect gameplay. For instance Forest, Water, and Deep Water are all different masks we use. The “Special” ones are the masks unique to each Biome. Initially for Tropical we were considering Quicksand or even a revamp of the Lava mask. Again though, I wanted to push something new into the fold to break us away from some of the stuff we had already done. After looking at so many tropical plants (and probably my general foliage inclined disposition) I suggested what was later deemed the “Pollen Mask”.
Here I played around some different ideas, again keeping color and shape language in mind. Thinking about how things are going to read from a distance is pretty vital. After landing on some of the designs, I put together a ‘key’ of all the pieces.
While I worked on modeling foliage and creating textures, our wonderful VFX and Environment Artist Will Avery worked on setting up waterfalls, pollen VFX, and chiseled out rock prefabs for us to use on the maps.
After doing some modeling and texturing, here is an earlier shot where things started coming together a little bit. As you can see there were still some color adjustments we made further down the line. For a brief period the pollen plants were pink.
There was also a ‘Blue Period’ for the whole Biome, but we pulled it back from that.
Anyway that is pretty much it. Through lots of iteration and feedback and about 5 months of work we landed on the final Biome you see in game. Shooting for something new, while trying to keep it in theme for BATTLETECH.
I really enjoyed this opportunity to take the reins on this biome from start to finish. It was fun playing around with different ideas and seeing them come to fruition. Hope you all enjoyed the final look!
I’ll go ahead and jump right in to my process for conjuring the look and feel of the Tropical Biome. I was instantly excited when given the prompt - maps with lots of foliage? This was going to be my jam.
Immediately I started looking into reference images, that’s always a great start. During my collection and absorption of the reference images, I also started dividing things into various folders so I can easily find specific images when I need them. Things ended up being parsed out into Beach (ocean, sand, cliffsides, rock formations), Jungle (deep forested areas), Tropical Plants, and Waterfalls. Waterfalls were a feature mentioned early on that we wanted to test and see how we could approach them best visually for BATTLETECH.
After parsing through the reference, one of the first potential problem areas that stuck out to me was the idea of doing another “green” forested biome. I wanted to take advantage of the tropical aspects to push it away from our Highland and Lowland sets and get a different look. I tried to achieve this differentiation through shape language as well as color. I spent a bit of time on the palm tree in the set because I knew it would be one of the most defining features of the forest here. I played around with different silhouettes and leaf styles, some of which continued to change even as I got into the modeling process.
With the Biomes, I always do a side by side lineup all of all my main pieces I have decided on, and play with the heights of each piece to make the forest look more full when brought together. Making the forest feel full felt especially important here for the jungle.
Also early in the process, I took a stab at doing a very sketchy look and feel piece.
I was mostly thinking about ground/rock texture, color, and how we could play with distribution of land in this biome to create something different with lots of small islands.
Another thing brought to my attention at the time was that we had not landed on a Special Design Mask. “Design Masks” are what we call the different sections of ground that affect gameplay. For instance Forest, Water, and Deep Water are all different masks we use. The “Special” ones are the masks unique to each Biome. Initially for Tropical we were considering Quicksand or even a revamp of the Lava mask. Again though, I wanted to push something new into the fold to break us away from some of the stuff we had already done. After looking at so many tropical plants (and probably my general foliage inclined disposition) I suggested what was later deemed the “Pollen Mask”.
Here I played around some different ideas, again keeping color and shape language in mind. Thinking about how things are going to read from a distance is pretty vital. After landing on some of the designs, I put together a ‘key’ of all the pieces.
While I worked on modeling foliage and creating textures, our wonderful VFX and Environment Artist Will Avery worked on setting up waterfalls, pollen VFX, and chiseled out rock prefabs for us to use on the maps.
After doing some modeling and texturing, here is an earlier shot where things started coming together a little bit. As you can see there were still some color adjustments we made further down the line. For a brief period the pollen plants were pink.
There was also a ‘Blue Period’ for the whole Biome, but we pulled it back from that.
Anyway that is pretty much it. Through lots of iteration and feedback and about 5 months of work we landed on the final Biome you see in game. Shooting for something new, while trying to keep it in theme for BATTLETECH.
I really enjoyed this opportunity to take the reins on this biome from start to finish. It was fun playing around with different ideas and seeing them come to fruition. Hope you all enjoyed the final look!
