Apex Legends: Season 8 - Crash Site
Season 8 was the Respawn Vancouver environment team's first big forray into making content for Apex Legends, and I had the chance to take ownership over a few key moments.
_________________________
Crashed Ship: For this new zone, I was tasked with owning the terrain and general set dressing of the area. I took this zone from Look Dev all the way to final art, with support from my peers on the art team.
Mostly, I was focused with creating the terrain, and the respective materials we'd need (Some new, some alterations), as well as a few key assets to sell the blasted out nature of the area.
I also took ownership for the Artillery Destruction, taking a once beloved Apex POI and blowing it up to create a new choke for players to get to the new zone.
_________________________
Observation Tower: For this asset, I was initially tasked with creating a straightforward tower, but I wanted to take it a step further and try to incorporate some dynamic elements to this piece.
This asset eventually became one our Map Toys for this season - Scattered across the map for players to find. It deploys from a platform to a sniper perch, and adds a fun new level of verticality to the play space.
I owned the look development and ideation for this asset, taking it from block-in to final art.
_________________________
Season 8 Environment art team
_________________________
Art Director:
Eduardo Agostini
_________________________
Environment Art Team:
Gavin Bartlett
Derek Bentley
Jared Bosse
Kevin Hsu
Cindy Khang
Jason McKenzie (Lead)
Gavin Yastremski
Eric Zimmer
_________________________
Lighting Team:
Morgan Wang
Nu-Lee Han
_________________________
Concept Art:
Jens Holdner
Luke Suzumoto
_________________________
Level Designers:
Rand Stayer (Lead)
Keith Jensen
_________________________
FX Artist:
David Franco
Crash Site - One of the pathways through to our new zone.
We really wanted to sell the idea of this fuel leaking from the crashed ship and contaminating the water throughout the entire level, seeding future story elements.
It was important to make this new zone feel different from the rest of this level, so new cliff types and terrain materials came into play.
I wanted to bring in some green elements to the far ends of the zone, in order to add a little more color to this environment.
Observation tower - A simple prop that added a some nice verticality to our new zones. Players find it in this state...
... and activate it to raise it up, alerting nearby squads you've done so through audio cues, but also giving you a nice defensible sniper perch.
Artillery Choke - One of my tasks for this season was changing one of the maps original POIs by blowing it up.
Large support beams hold up a wall on the verge of collapse.
Inside view looking into the crash site zone.
