DICE Vegetation artist Simon Barle shared some secrets of creating detailed natural landscapes worthy of Battlefield and Uncharted.

About Simon Barle

I’m a 3D artist from Sweden working at DICE as a vegetation artist. I’ve always had an interest in video games and a pretty vivid imagination so working with games was a pretty natural choice for me. I started playing around with Maya and Photoshop when I was about 14 years old and later on applied to a school that focuses on game development called Playgroundsquad in my early 20´s. The School had a 6 month internship period where you basically had to find yourself an internship at a company and finish of your education by getting some real world practice. I got an internship at EASY studios which later on made me come in contact with DICE.

The Beauty of Nature in 3D

Huangshan, Simon Barle, 2015

I think what intrigues me the most is the amount of subtle variations found in nature that together makes a whole. I like creating vistas for the viewer, even though the environment might be fairly small I like placing distance in the scenes, so there is a sense of depth and you get the feeling you are gazing across something vast and alive.

Building Components

One of the most important steps is to break everything down into components. For example, if the environment relies heavily on grass I would start by creating that base component so there is a solid base to build upon with other assets. I usually spend some time looking through reference pictures or just images for inspiration and try to lock down the major components needed to get the right feel of the environment, I tend to start with the larger components, leaving detail for a later stage.