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Interviews:
Ocean Quigley
Ocean
Quigley was the Art Director for SimCity 3000, and has worked
at Maxis for over 5 years!
[Jason]
How long have you been at maxis?
[Ocean]
Since '95. Almost 5 years. Since before the EA acquisition.
[Jason]
Explain exactly what you do.
[Ocean] I'm an art director,
so I do a lot of conceptual art design. I come up with styles
and techniques for making the art in games and then oversee
art production once we know what we're doing.
[Jason]
What program did you use to create the buildings in SimCity
3000?
[Ocean] The old game art
standby-3DStudio Max. It's really a workhorse, we made pretty
much all of the content for SimCity 3000 in it. Also photoshop
for textures. Pretty standard tools in the game biz
[Jason]
What was the process a building had to go through to be created?
[Ocean] First we'd decide
what kind of building we wanted to make. Residential? Commercial?
Civic? and so on. Then we'd find good reference material.
I went out and shot thousands of photographs of buildings
out here in the San Francisco Bay area, and also on the east
coast and in New Orleans. Once we'd figured out what we wanted,
we just built it in Max. No real clever techniques, just lots
of polys and textures. Then we'd render out the different
zooms and rotations and put them in the game.
[Jason]
How many different buildings were created?
[Ocean] I've lost track.
Lots. Many hundreds...
[Jason]
If a building was scrapped, why and for what reason did it
not make it into SimCity 3000?
[Ocean] There were two
main reasons why a building wouldn't make the cut. 1. It was
ugly, or badly done and didn't meet the level of quality that
we had set for ourselves. 2. It didn't properly represent
what it was supposed to; for example if you're trying to make
a low land value house, and it looks like a ritzy boutique
instead, you know that it's not doing its job, and so it would
be scrapped (or reassigned).
[Jason]
Where did you get your inspiration for each building?
[Ocean] Mostly from the
real world. There's lots of beautiful buildings out there.
Once you get in the mindset, almost no matter where you go,
you see a building and think "now that would be cool in SimCity"
[Jason]
What was the hardest part behind art in SimCity 3000?
[Ocean] Probably just
the quantity of buildings. That and making sure that we were
properly representing what was going on in the simulator with
our art.
[Jason]
Did you have any involvement with the art behind the Building
Architect Tool?
[Ocean] Just some initial
design work. The artist who brought it to completion is Joseph
Knight.
[Jason]
Now that SimCity 3000 is finished, are you involved with any
other games?
[Ocean] You bet, but I
can't really talk about them.
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