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Halo 3 Environment/Level Pipeline

By Rayna Anderson

For the last big event before the summer break, IGDA Montreal had an opportunity to look deep into the bowels (more on this later) of one of the best selling games of the year, Halo 3. From Bungie Studios came Vic DeLeon, Senior Environment Artist, and Mike Zak, Lead Environment Artist, to give us two presentations for the price of one! With that much ground to cover, Vic needed all the Red Bull and chocolate-covered coffee beans he could get his hands on.

Both presentations are available online at Bungie Publications and the video of the presentation will be available shortly, so I'll only cover the highlights.

First up was Mike, whose presentation was entitled simply Environment Design in Halo 3. This talk (which he also presented at the most recent GDC) covered the art-centric pipelines and processes that Bungie had in place to produce the art for their game. As the architect for the Storm level, Mike walked us through the whole process, from "napkin art" to finishing touches. He discussed the roles of the different people involved and how they all come together to create the terrain that's "a massive sculpture" and more like creating a character than typical game terrain.

Since their process is focused on the art, the environmental artists at Bungie also play the roll of level designers. He talked about the "cheat sheet" they use to ensure that every area had all the elements in it that could support gameplay. With all of these things in mind through pre-production, the designs evolved and became more and more detailed. Once everything was in place, the role of the architect was complete and it was handed over to the finishing artist to add the final touches.

Next Vic took the stage to discuss the conceptual evolution of the Flood levels with his presentation called Halo 3 Flood Alien Level Autopsy. Vic, who has a background in biology, played the duel roles of both architect and finishing artist for Floodgate and Cortana. Just where do you start when you need to come up with a life-form level? Starfish, ginseng roots and BBQ ribs, apparently. Inspiration was found just about everywhere in nature and if you look closely, you can see where those things are inside the game. This includes the endoscopic voyages that he used for reference and the sphincter door which he says for organic designs, "It's pretty cliché, but you've got to have one!"

He also talked about a problem that everyone faces, redesign. One level was way too long and the other was way too short (check out the presentation to see the original layouts for those levels to see how much they've changed). Even when the layouts were fine, the textures needed lots of fine-tuning. Prototypes, light tests and texturing went through months of being too stringy, too pretty and too fungal until they landed on the final look.

There were lots of challenges along the way, like rendering the surfaces AI friendly, making the transitions between organic (Flood) and inorgainc (ships) matter and coming up with a way to cover up some unsightly seam problems with the textures. Despite all the problems they encountered, Vic concluded, "I think we brought the Flood to life in a way that's true to the Halo universe."