With the epic movie trilogy complete, you'd think that EA might have a hard time coming up with a new story for The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth II, the sequel to last year's real-time strategy game. However, the movies covered just a part of J.R.R. Tokien's vast Middle-earth universe. So EA secured the license to the literary portions of the universe and is now combining the two to create The Battle for Middle-earth II. But how do you create imagery for things in the books that we've never seen on film? And how do you make it consistent with what we've already seen? To answer, we got EA LA's Matt J. Britton, the art director on the game.

　　The artists take concept art that looks like this...

The Look of Middle-earth

　　Art Director, EA LA

　　As art director on The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth II, I'm basically the keeper of the look of the game. I manage all of the artists, keeping a watchful eye on quality and doing my best to ensure that the look of the game is as true to the look of Peter Jackson's films as possible. Additionally, because this year's game also includes locations and characters from the J.R.R. Tolkien fiction that never appeared in the movies, my job includes envisioning what these things will look like in the world we've created based on New Line Cinema's films.

　　In The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth, we established a muted, almost painterly, look to the game art. This time around we're able to bring a little more rendering tech to the table, which impacts that look. It was a real challenge creating a real-time strategy game that matched the look of the films. Our canvas, so to speak, is much smaller than this. For example, our game is played from a God's-eye view of the battlefields. When you look at the game world from this angle, the structures and people are pretty tiny. So we're keeping the painterly look of the first game, but we're adding some specific technology that takes it a little further and amps up the visual subtleties so those tiny little structures and people look more detailed and even truer to the movies.

　　One thing that has been central to The Battle for Middle-earth II and its predecessor has been our relationship with New Line Cinema. We're really fortunate to be able to work so closely with them. From them, we have a wealth of information, including a fantastic database of imagery from the films. We're using all of that stuff for the film-based characters and the film-based locations. We also use all of that material as a jumping off point for characters who are in the books but aren't in the films, such as Glorfindel.

　　and turn it into gameplay that looks like this.

　　It's been an exciting challenge bringing regions and cities that are exclusive to the books into our new game. This time, for example, we'll go to the city of Fornost, which is described in the books but doesn't appear in the movies. However, because we know it's a Numenorean city, and the Numenoreans were the ancestors of the Gondorians, we had some ideas what their architecture might look like in Middle-earth. The Numenoreans built the Argonath statues and Amon Hen, which do appear in the movies. So we had a few touchstones we were able to use in order to visualize Fornost in a manner consistent with the film's vision of Middle-earth.

　　We used the same basic plan when envisioning the goblin architecture. In the films, the goblins don't really build anything of their own; they just take over places built by others, such as the dwarven mines of Moria. Without any real locations that we could use to aid us in creating their architecture, we turned instead to the armor they wear in the movies. Their armor has a kind of rusty, spiky look to it--very loose and natural, and not terribly symmetrical. We made a lot of their buildings out of the same kind of forms, figuring that the same aesthetic behind the armor design might also influence the building design.

　　In fact, the art in the overall game--even those locations that do appear in the films--has improved by leaps and bounds. We're getting a lot more detail out of our environments and our architecture by utilizing normal mapping. This technique allows us to punch up the detail level and make everything more realistic and readable. Our use of distance fog, for example, has helped us render in greater depth many of the locations that appear in the movies. Places like the dead marshes and the paths of the dead, which were foggy environments in the film, really benefit from this technique. By using distance fog we can capture a lot more of that look. In the film, many of those scenes were processed in postproduction with a bleach bypass filter, which desaturates the color palette. To match this, we used a lookup table that limits the game to that palette and really delivers on the look of the movie locations. It's one of the things we're really excited about, because the look is really evocative of what you saw in the movies.

　　The battle for Middle-earth will continue next year.

　　The secret to my success as an art director--and the success of The Battle for Middle-earth II in general--is the fact that we surround ourselves with wonderful talent and provide them with a singular vision to work toward. It's what makes my job uniquely rewarding.

　　Thanks for reading this month's designer diary. Next month, Richard Taylor will tell you about the cinematics design in The Battle for Middle-earth II.