In 2006, I was in charge of a small team, for the making of the biggest Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter Map [1km*1km]. That map was an helicopter ride starting in Juarez and ending in USA. Was the level artist of the team. Modeling, Texturing, Baking, Optimisations, Management. [Suburb, City, Industry].
The biggest challenges were :
- Building a credible city within Xbox360 constraints.
- Modeling the floor and buildings according to my level designer bynom.
- UV1 for Shading, Uv2 for AO baking.
- Xenon memory couldn't handle lightmaps so we decided to go with vertex color AO.
- Optimizations, optimizations, and optimizations.
- Making a texture template, so an artist could make all the uvs, while an additional texture artist would work in parallel.
- Bug hunting & Debug
Credits to the small team that helped me out : Jessica Seraphim [Optimizations], Laurent Debarge [AO & UVs], Michel Vibert [Electrical wire placements], Nicols Jeannot [Factories]. Ivan Gaidon [Additional texturing].