Black Ops 4
I was privileged to be one of the first environment artists to work on Blackout, Black Ops 4's new Battle Royale mode. We set out to make the largest Call of Duty map ever, by a huge margin, and it came with a host of new bugs, challenges, rules, and restrictions. Optimization was everything. Every asset had to be as cheap as possible, both in tri count and streamer cost, creating restrictions on everything from collision tri count to number of decals allowed. And it all still had to hold up to the game's visual goals.
I was responsible for asset creation and optimizations, including kits for a number of the map's bridges, as well as all of the dirt and asphalt roads and intersections. In addition, I helped early on to look dev some of the map's "Biomes," kits of materials, plants, rocks, and all the various terrain assets that make up the map's different terrain types, including early development of all of the map's plants, bushes, and trees, which were later distributed to various other artists for completion.
With any discussion of Blackout, I need to give credit to Andy Livingston, the Environment Art Specialist in charge of Blackout, without whom this map would never have happened, as well as Treyarch's immensely talented engineering team, who I'm pretty sure had to perform some kind of dark magic to let us do all the things we were able to do, and the art team at Raven, who assisted immensely in making this happen.
