SMITE 2: Conquest Map

Shots of the SMITE 2 Conquest map

This was a long time coming, in more ways than one. It was equal parts fun and stressful to try and come up with the pipeline, style and overall plan for what SMITE would look like in UE5. I was able to join the project fairly early in development so I got to have a lot of input on stylistic choices, modeling and material pipelines, technical specs etc. and I got to participate in a lot of tests to determine what sorts of UE5 features we would make use of and which ones wouldn't play nice with our style or game design.

Biggest highlights were that I helped establish a material system for our architecture that allowed us use multiple UV channels to achieve trim sheet based normal map bevels on our buildings while maintaining contiguous (or intentionally broken) tiling textures underneath those bevels and keeping overall polygon density low for performance and ease of modeling. The Order Base buildings highlight it well, where you have beveled corners with contiguous marble patterns underneath.

I did a lot of early modeling for both team bases, though ultimately the order base was finished out by other folks on the team. And I did a lot of early iteration on the ground materials and our attempts to use the Landscape system, though later we pivoted to a static mesh and different materials.

The tileables were put together almost exclusively using Substance Designer to allow for rapid iteration as we were often having to experiment with our approach to making assets, establishing style guidelines, solidifying pipeline, etc., while simultaneously building the finished version of the assets that would be shipped.

I also got to sculpt out some of the hero props like the giant horns surrounding the back of the Chaos base, the dynamic "rock door" that can be opened into the back of the Fire Giant pit for ambushes and the huge glowing sword buried in ground at the Fire Giant pit.

A lot of this was somewhat hastily pulled together given the timeline and team size we had, but I'm still quite proud of what we achieved with the time we were given.

As always SMITE maps are a collaboration here's other folks that worked on this map

https://www.artstation.com/omedak
https://www.artstation.com/battleyak
https://www.artstation.com/fragbits
https://www.artstation.com/ersh777
https://www.artstation.com/artoframon
https://www.artstation.com/ayayron
https://www.artstation.com/christiandavis
https://spiralfoux.studio/
https://www.artstation.com/joeperugini
https://www.artstation.com/hoppingpanda