Graham Kelly: Although the environments for DA:I were an order of magnitude larger than those of DAII, the power and flexibility of the Frostbite engine, coupled with the largest art team ever assembled on a BioWare project allowed us to bring the world of Thedas to life in way which wasn't possible before.

The vast majority of environments in DA:I would have needed to have been drastically scaled back in scope with the previous engine. Frostbite essentially got rid of such limitations and enabled the Art and Design teams to create these epic environments that we'd always seen in the concept art but never quite been able to achieve. DA:I was the first project at BioWare to use the Frostbite engine, so the challenge for the entire team was in learning to adopt a completely new engine with an entirely new workflow at the same time as developing a next-gen RPG across 5 platforms.

Graham Kelly: One of the big advantages of moving to Frostbite and Gen 4 consoles was that we were able to use Displacement Mapping on terrain and certain environment assets -- most notably the rock assets. This enabled us to match more closely the fidelity of sculpts that we were seeing in ZBrush, transferring those details into the game in a way that normal maps alone couldn't achieve.

Also, artists will never complain when given more polygons to play with along with increased texture resolutions. Couple that with more realistic shaders, lighting and VFX. The fidelity of the environment assets and art in general improved across the board.

Graham Kelly: Very much so. Although we'd used ZBrush for environment assets on previous titles, DA:I was the first time we used it to create tileable environment textures. As we were new to this approach, it was very much a learning process for us but towards the end of the project we had artists creating tileable textures purely in ZBrush.

We started with the 2.5D approach of dropping meshes to the canvas and then arranging them via the Layer palette. However, this was found to be too restrictive for us, as further edits couldn't be made once the meshes were dropped to canvas. In the end, with ZBrush being able to handle millions of polys without a hitch, we decided to keep each individual part as a separate Subtool. Using this method, we kept things non-destructive in the event that textures needed to change later on.

Graham Kelly: For me, I'd have to say the lush forests, farmsteads and ruined forts of the Hinterlands and the bustling village of Redcliffe. In terms of both content and art, it was the most densely populated environment we'd attempted on a Dragon Age game. The sheer scale of it meant that there were lots of hidden areas and things to find, something that I'm personally a big fan of.

Shane Hawco: DAII was mostly done using ZBrush 3.5 and 4 where 4r6 was largely used for Dragon Age: Inquisition assets. But we are all embracing 4r7 now! ;)

Shane Hawco: ZBrush is slowly starting to make its way into the concept art department. It's a great place for the concept team to start roughing out ideas for characters and props for the environments. On Dragon Age: Inquisition, Ramil Sunga was the concept artist who integrated into the character team. He utilized ZBrush during the development of the new head customization system for DA:I.

Ramil Sunga: ZBrush was instrumental to the concept pipeline. A huge part of game development is iteration and revision. We are constantly changing and improving ideas, and having the benefit to iterate on designs directly in ZBrush was extremely efficient. I would often use ZBrush in conjunction with a paint over for a variety of my tasks.

Shane Hawco: ZBrush was mostly used on Dragon Age: Inquisition for its incredible sculpting ability. We did utilize the texture painting feature for blocking out face textures as well as new patterns and details on existing assets.

Ramil Sunga: On the current gen, we can now produce higher fidelity detail in our characters and have it actually be useful. In order to keep the visual aesthetic developed for the Dragon Age franchise we chose not to use scan data for micro details, so we relied a lot on photo manipulation. We used Projection Master and Photoshop to generate pore detail and fine wrinkles.

Patrik Karlsson: When texture painting in ZBrush, I found the Mask by Cavity feature to be extremely powerful. On the dragons, it gave us a very nice and easy way to be able to paint areas between the scales and in various cracks of skin, making the look of it all much more believable and seamless.

Rion Swanson: I found that Polypaint was very helpful for painting in landmarks or markings according to concept art. It then became much easier to sculpt from there, knowing precise locations. An example of this is the Avvar bear from the Jaws of Hakkon DLC, where the war paint and caked-on mud had to roughly line up in most places.

Aaron Dibbs: Dynamesh became a very useful tool for me when developing new creatures or making alternate versions of a creature type. I could take an already built model that I know anatomy-wise fits the rig needs, bring it in and convert it to Dynamesh then just start sculpting. Knowing that the core “bone structure” already matched the needs of the rig but then being able to go to town adding and totally reworking the model was an awesome, fast, and creative way to work. After you get my new shapes, I would do a quick retopo with ZRemesher and be ready to go for subdividing and detailing with the new shapes. If I'd find a problem area as I went, I'd just freeze the top layer, do another ZRemesh to adjust the areas that needed it, then unfreeze and be back to sculpting your details in minutes. Those two tools working together has been a huge workflow improvement on any new models I work on.

Francis Lacuna: Definitely ZRemesher. Being able to quickly generate a low-density quad mesh made it especially useful for reworking sculpts. This feature was extremely helpful when designing the High Dragon. In the past, it was a struggle to have to maintain subdivisions if there were major revisions. Now we can make drastic changes to an asset and regenerate a proxy that could be skin wrapped and dropped into the game almost instantly.

Patrik Karlsson: I did try out NoiseMaker for Iron Bull's helmet and found it to be very useful, even if my application of it was quite small. I then passed that information on to the team, and Rion was able to utilize it to greater effect. I used Dynamesh when I was working on the Nightmare to be able to experiment with the design in the earlier stages.

Uri So: I like ZRemesher in the new ZBrush features. When I want to get a clean mesh with ZRemesher, I do a few things. First, I make a high poly with Dynamesh. Second, I apply ZRemesher features and divide the mesh several times. For the last step I project everything from the original mesh. This is a really good way to save time and the result is excellent.

Rion Swanson: NoiseMaker came in super handy for Blackwall's base outfit quilted jacket, specifically. Once I learned how to use it and made some adjustments to my UVs, it was quick and easy. I love how it wraps the pattern around the mesh so uniformly.

I tried out FiberMesh a bit and it was pretty amazing. It's great for allowing you to create some more believable looking hair or fur really quickly.

Also, BPR rendering was great for quick work-in-progress sculpt shots for critiques, or for final images.

Patrik Karlsson: The new and improved ZRemesher looks very promising, thanks to the latest adjustments to it. I would use that for sure. The Copy/Paste feature feels like a welcomed add-on to the workflow to speed things up. I do like the new FBX export and the fact that it supports Displacement, Normal and Texture maps. That's something I would definitely have a lot of use for. Creased Edge Beveling sounds amazing and something I am looking into at the moment. Working with that in mind would alter the way I would build my mesh at very early stages even before I bring it into ZBrush so that it does make a big difference, once again saving time and effort.

Rion Swanson: As many artists already do, I'd like to get more comfortable creating fine detail geometry directly in ZBrush instead of having to make so many tiny detail parts in an external program and then bring them in. Scenes can get out of control with huge numbers of Subtools, so grouping more of them together in a logical way and separating by UVs will be another thing I do more of as a general rule. I've played a little with the new ZModeler brush and look forward to getting more familiar with it. It seems to offer a lot of control and to allow you to build very quickly.

ZRemesher is going to help out a lot and I'm sure I'll be using it all the time.

I love using GoZ now as it's a great way to speed up importing meshes from Maya.

I want to learn more about Dynamic Curves when creating primitives, as well as deformation features for creating new small-detail parts.

I'm also looking forward to further exploring the newest BPR features and I'm really excited to try the MicroMesh and Insert Multi-Mesh tools.

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