Alexis Boyer has recently joined the Quixel team to talk about the way she’s been using Megascans to add more details to the beautiful world of Colossus.
I think the sheer volume of vegetation that needed to be created was probably the biggest challenge. Shadow of the Colossus is built kind of like a theme park. There are a lot of biomes that merge together in ways that may not necessarily be realistic. There are areas in the game where dense forests blend into sandy deserts. Because of the multitude of biomes, there were quite a few very specific needs for these areas. We really tried to make sure that the areas seemed unique — and vegetation played a big role in helping define that.
Being the only artist creating vegetation, it started out being extremely overwhelming. We had this world that was mostly natural environments and just one person to create the assets for it. I think for any artist this would be an intimidating task. Thankfully, I had access to Megascans to assist in the production.
Was Megascans able to give you the freedom to run with any artistic choice that sprang to mind? Did you feel enabled to give complete expression of your ideas?
While I was working on the Shadow of the Colossus remake, the library was much smaller than it is now. Even back then, I was able to create most of what I needed without having the exact correct atlas. If you combined Megascans atlases and 3D scans together, you get some pretty excellent results. I did this to create the grass and a lot of the branches used for trees in the game; arranging them in Maya and then baking them down to a new atlas. From there, I could create hundreds of new individual branches that you probably never would have known started out as Megascans.
You can find the full interview here. You can also find more details on the production process in our exclusive interview with the team here.