Laying It All Out

I was one of the first guys on the team for the X-COM pitch cinematic.  While our 2-D animatic and hero characters were being made I was busy laying out our set, and building low poly proxy models for all the objects and spaces our characters were going to exist in and interact with.  I then placed cameras that closely matched the storyboards and 2-D animatic.  This allowed us to figure out the scale of our world, test out our 2D ideas in a 3D space, and create an environment for early animation tests.  The modelers were then able to very efficiently remodel everything in high poly using my models as a template.

Creating this low poly set did not take much time, and paid dividends further in the pipeline since a lot of problems had been figured out before any really expensive work was done.  Everyone could focus on making a visually stunning cinematic.

Take a look at this layout page showing my early low poly set, and stills of the finished set from the final movie.