SMITE 2: Joust Map
Shots of some of my material and prop work for the SMITE 2 Joust map
While most of the team was working on porting over SMITE 1 Arena to UE5 I had the privilege of spending a fair amount of R&D time on what our approach to Joust might be. The Environment team as a whole got really excited at the prospect of going back to SMITE 1's early roots and doing an Arthurian inspired map now that we actually have Arthurian characters in SMITE. We came up with the idea to portray an assault upon Camelot from Arthur's son Mordred as an attempt to seize the crown, a conflict that ultimately results in Arthur's death in his mythos.
I got to spend time considering our trim and tileable options to efficiently put together the castle scene we had planned and initially I had four different brick variations for use throughout the level. I had the time to sculpt out each variant in Zbrush which I did rather than create them fully in Substance because we wanted the option to have destruction and would need matching bricks with a baked fully 3D model in addition to the tileables. The plaster and moss that were blended in however were handled fully via Substance Designer.
I worked extensively on the ground meshes and materials. Unlike the architectural materials the ground materials were created exclusively through Substance Designer to maintain flexibility and keep it easy to create a broad range of brick patterns with consistent scale, detailing and brick wear etc. We opted for a static mesh approach rather than landscape, an approach we adopted on Conquest around the same time. I made great use of the more urban environment, a departure from much of SMITE's environments historically, it allowed for lots of useful break-up both for technical and artistic reasons. We were able to have street curbs that help to designate the edges of collision volumes and provide a transition zone before hitting that player collision. The curbs also made for clean areas to separate portions of the mesh to isolate more complex or unique materials for camps, tower pads and phoenix pads. The ground meshes all share UV coordinates on a separate channel that allows for contiguous dirt and grass blending between disparate meshes like the unique floater meshes that provide design elements to break up tiling.
In addition to all the material work in both pre-production and production proper, I ended up handled a great deal of the architecture. Some blockouts were created early on by others in the team but ultimately I was responsible for the final modeling on the entirety of the architecture in the Chaos and Order Bases, most of the mid-lane jungle buildings and the red camp buildings that sit on the outer edge of the map. The only buildings I didn't end up touching at all are the buildings surrounding Merlin's Tower towards the back of the map.
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. The team really gave their all to put this thing together.
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/ayayron
https://www.artstation.com/fragbits
https://www.artstation.com/battleyak
https://spiralfoux.studio/
https://www.artstation.com/ersh777
https://www.artstation.com/artoframon
https://www.artstation.com/christiandavis
