Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2019 - Khandor Hideout
Hideout was an interesting map to work on because it started as me just focusing on art and then transitioning to my current role- Senior Technical Environment Artist. This meant that, after my art tasks were done, I moved over to running the art side of things and really digging into performance debugging and optimization.
The field of grass was a weird challenge because the designers wanted it to be possible to hide in the tall grass during normal gameplay. Unfortunately, this caused a lot of rendering and performance problems, especially for the player(s) actually in the grass, so we had to thin the grass out and disable a lot of rendering features.
Ironically, there's not a ton of people that use the grass in that capacity; everyone has wildly colorful character and weapon skins!
Props to the map runner for Hideout, Josh-David Isaacson; working on this map was smooth sailing! https://www.artstation.com/jdvi
I'm always flattered when some of my stuff is in the load screens, particularly in the foreground!
This started out as a designer block, so I had to get creative and work with the map runner and our AD to brainstorm something interesting.
We came up with the solution to create a sniper roost/listening post, but a lot of those assets got cut for memory
This rooftop is inaccessible, but can still be seen from Killstreaks and player-controlled drones; Keeping these spaces interesting and efficient is always a balancing act.
I was focusing on story telling/world building for the interiors of this building; lots of callbacks to our SP campaign and other MP maps.
Props to our lighting team for making every room feel just that little bit different.
This interior (and really the map as a whole) tested the limits of our engine in terms of dynamic and scripted props. Almost everything in this scene can be shot, blown up, or otherwise reacts to gameplay events.
The painted cinder block pillar was a scanned asset I processed very early on to be game-ready; using it throughout the project and even here in DLC speaks to how useful it is to break up flat surfaces and how good photogrammetry is!
The huge pile of explosives ended up being cut, but the initial art pass of this space told us that we didn't need all those props to sell the identity of this space!
