Forza Motorsports

As a senior environment artist specializing in biomes, I was responsible for the development of the Vegetation and Terrain creation. A combination of photogrammetry, procedurally and parametric techniques were deployed to develop the biomes for each track. My responsibilities were to establish pipelines, techniques, and strategies across the various asset types. I worked with artists and outsourcers to understand and create the art assets as well as work with other departments to establish the pipeline. This span across trees, overgrowth, grass fields, and all terrain surfaces outside of the track.

Creating vegetation for a race track is a unique challenge because of the issue that you can’t quite just change the map if it’s a real life track. You have to find compromises to insure smoothness of gameplay. Also, insuring the content worked with all aspects of the game. Whether that is varying weather or varying day, in shadow or artificial light.

To create the vegetation pipeline, I worked with tech art, tools, houdini team, lighting and rendering to problem solve and implement the workflow. We collaborated on priority, what works, handling, tooling, integration, performance and how it would work across our various scenarios.

^ One of the trees I had created. Photogrammetry trunk, tiling bark texture for the branches and photo reference images for the leaves. I visited the track and specifically scanned this tree because of it’s importance for drivers to aim their car down the cork screw because of the blind drop.

Utilized the Laser scanning of the track to cut out trees as a guide

Being on the track to take photos of the trees to get best captures.

Grass was another system I helped work on. Developing a setup that would help artists create better tools while pushing the fidelity of the placement of them in the world.

Terrain is another aspect I helped cover, but not as in-depth as vegetation. Terrain in this game is considered the surface outside of the track.
These techniques would be for other artists and outsourcing to help develop the vegetation content needed for this game. This translated to tutorials, tools, process,

On top of all of this is a setup that would allow the artists to scatter vegetation on the terrain surfaces (trees, overgrowth and grass.)

Images below is to show the breath of vegetation and terrain. How those two “systems” needed to be in place. A culmination of various techniques, working with various teams and artists to bring that aspect up to spec for this franchise.