Article Intro
Motor CityBuilding a Burnout world is no small task. Luckily, we've got world-class artists behind the wheel. In this series, key members of our world art team will take you behind the scenes, track by track, and show you how the world of Burnout Revenge came to life.
What's your general approach for creating the tracks?
Richard: In a way, the process of designing a track is similar to that of production designing a movie set or location; the details must all support the vision and spirit of the location we are trying to emulate. In order to succeed in this, there are 2 main criteria which we always aim to fulfill. These are:
- The location should present plenty of opportunities for gameplay, both in terms of the types of roads/driving offered, but also (since Burnout: Revenge), alternate routes, shortcuts, jumps, etc.
- The location must have a strong visual character with many opportunities for grand and stunning vistas and reveals, whilst also complementing the other locations in the game.
If you look at the locations in Burnout, especially in Takedown and Revenge, you will see that they all satisfy these criteria.
Once we've decided on a set of locations in a game, we always try and send our artists to experience them in person and to take thousands of reference photos.
These photos are then used to create hundreds of mood boards which serve as visual guides to each distinct area of the track. This helps us to achieve not only a visually interesting sense of journey but it also helps the player know where they are on the route!
What made you decide to create custom made Crash courses for Burnout: Revenge?
Richard: Well, seeing how popular Crash mode had become, we wanted to outdo ourselves and make the Crash junctions in Revenge even more outrageous than ever before. Creating courses specifically for this purpose gave us the opportunity to do this. Motor City, Eternal City, Lone Peak and Central Route presented the most ideas for ludicrous Crash junctions so those were the ones we selected.
How did the Crash courses differ from the race courses?
Richard: The initial brief for the Crash courses was to have more opened up environments, with multiple routes at varying heights (even more so than the race courses) and opportunities for absurd leaps off of buildings and the like. This of course gave us some technical challenges, as we had to squeeze extra space and complexity out of the same game engine used for the race routes. Thanks to the ingenuity of the art team, though, we managed to pull it off.
Graphics-wise, you always seem to squeeze a lot out of the PS2 for the environments. How the heck do you manage that at 60fps?
Scott: Running at 60fps means that we instantly can't afford to do half the fancy effects that other games do. Burnout Revenge came out at the end of the PS2/Xbox generation, when all of our competitors were experimenting with things like normal mapping and real-time shadows - all at the expense of their frame rate.
This wasn't an option for the Burnout team. Aside from a couple of fancy new tricks courtesy of our graphics programmers (bloom - best thing ever!) we didn't have any technology that we didn't already have on Burnout 3. We have some of the most hardcore programmers in the world, but even they can't pull infinite resources out of thin air.
Yet we knew that, even as a current gen game, we had to look at least as good as our next gen competitors. So basically, the artists ourselves were tasked with making next gen graphics on a two-year-old current gen engine.
We managed this through a mixture of sheer brute force and a lot of smoke and mirrors. Our artists have initiative and a strong understanding of artistic fundamentals - this helped us create the illusion of expensive detail. For example, we couldn't afford high-res buildings. We couldn't get away with just slapping photographs on boxes, and we couldn't drop to a slideshow frame rate just to bevel a few windows and doors either. So we came up with a technique of layering low-res geometry on top of low-res geometry. As long as the buildings silhouetted well against the sky, the world looked expensive.
This approach of "doing the most with the least" became our guiding principle when overcoming challenges on the tracks. Can't do normal mapping? So what? Anyone with a specular shader and a lot of skill can outdo any normal map. Can't do real time shadows? Just paint them onto the world!
How do you know when your techniques have worked?
Scott: You know you've succeeded when you release your first screenshot and someone on a forum writes "this must be a next-gen shot. There's no way they could render that many fire-escapes on a PS2!" This actually happened.
