BioWare Blog: Creating the Polluted World of Hutta

I was away last weekend so a bit late with the update, but last Friday BioWare posted another BioWare blog entry for Star Wars: The Old Republic. This time it describes how the environment artists went about create Nal Hutta.

It's an interesting read as you get to see the general process involved with creating the environment of the various planets they have. Though it doesn't really give much game details that tell us how the game will play, it's still nice to read.

Here's an excerpt:

When we began work on Hutta, we knew it was supposed to be a polluted, filthy sewer of a planet, just like the Hutts would like it. Without any movie reference, we gathered a wide variety of real life photos of swamps and wetlands, taking note of common themes and basic shapes that come up again and again, like hanging moss, thin trees and ankle-deep water. We complimented this with a collection of images from industrial sites, construction zones and junk yards. Now that we know what this dump is supposed to look like we’re ready to start!

It goes on to detail how they create a representative test area, how they reiterate over that a few times to get it perfect, and then venture out to do the rest of the planet adding environment details to the rough gameplay map already created.