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"To add to the realism of the scenes, lights were added to lampposts, windows to buildings, torches on doorframes and beams of light shining from open doorways and through cracks."
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"Building a complex and interesting city is perhaps the most challenging part of the artistic process and, for this reason the most rewarding to see finished."
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"The Athkatlan scenes contain more unique objects and more variety than those of Baldur’s Gate."
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Developer Journal: Baldur's Gate II, pt. 4
Art Director Marcia Tofer tells us what it's like building a fantasy world from scratch.
January 14, 2000
In the fourth Baldur's Gate II Developer Journal, Art Director Marcia Tofer gives us some background on what it's was like creating and entire fantasy world from the bottom up. In this week's article, you'll learn about the graphical side of Baldur's Gate, and hear how the colossal city of Baldur's Gate was built, and how the majestic city of Athkatla from the upcoming sequel Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn is coming along.
Hello, my name is Marcia Tofer. I am the Art Director for Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn and for Baldur’s Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast. I started work at Bioware Corp. nearly four years ago. At that time, I worked on Shattered Steel and when that was complete, I began working on Baldur’s Gate. For both games I was a texturer, and as time went on I did a lot of scene setup and lighting for Baldur’s Gate. As the art director on BGII: SoA, I work with a team of 8-12 people to create all of the backgrounds, characters, monsters and spells.
This is my account of the planning and creation of the city of Baldur’s Gate, the largest and most complex of the cities within the hit RPG of the same name. The original goal for the artists working on the main city of Baldur’s Gate was to create a remarkably large and connected city. It was to have a realistic, sometimes grubby, medieval English appearance with many nooks and crannies to explore and open areas for interaction with city folk. There also needed to be night versions of each area.
In many ways these goals were met. The city of Baldur’s Gate was nine unique areas, each with a day and night version and doors that opened and closed. This brought the total number to thirty-six areas of 6x6 screens, or 1296 screens, or one image that is 23,040 x 17,280 pixels.
There are many models needed to fill a city this size. The Baldur’s Gate’s curtain wall, the large stone wall that surrounded the entire city, was built as a base for sizing and as a relational guide between areas. The curtain wall was made of two hundred and fifteen objects and was textured with a combination of thirty texture maps. Between the walls, many unique buildings were made and placed; such as the Iron Throne, Ramazith’s Tower, Flaming Fist and the Duchal Palace. These unique buildings were created as venues for the main story and plot to take place within. The majority of these unique buildings had three or four levels of custom interior art. The rest of the city was filled with generic pieces that were re-arranged and re-textured to allow for yet more diversity amongst the buildings. Additional objects such as barrels, crates, carts, wheel barrels, hay bails and lampposts were added to enhance the feeling that things were happening in this prosperous and active city.
 Once all of these diverse elements were brought together, we found that we had created some truly colossal scenes. Each area had a minimum of 800 to a maximum of 1000 objects. To add to the realism of the scenes, lights were added to lampposts, windows to buildings, torches on doorframes and beams of light shining from open doorways and through cracks. This brought the night scenes light count up to 300 lights.
When we started to render the thirty-six areas of Baldur’s Gate out, it became time for more hardware upgrades. To render one city scene on one computer (a Dual Pro 180’s with 256 megs of RAM- back in May of 1998) took between twenty-two and forty hours. Each machine needed at least an additional gigabyte in virtual memory. New methods for rendering these enormous scenes were developed and it became possible to render a single scene, or smaller piece of the city, over multiple computers. This greatly improved the turnout time but, because of the quantity of areas needed, it was still a very slow and trying process. The final image size of some of these pieces was up to 4000 pixels across by 3000 pixels high.
 In Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn, we have created another immense city. Many of our goals for the city of Baldur’s Gate also apply to Athkatla, the capital City of Amn (Amn is the primary setting of Shadows of Amn). Athkatla, however, will have larger areas of over 5000 x 4000 pixels, or sixty-four game screens. It is bigger still, as there are more explorable places within each area. The seaside city of Athkatla feels even more realistic and lived-in. The Athkatlan scenes contain more unique objects and more variety than those of Baldur’s Gate. Every building was created with a distinct purpose in mind. Wilderness scenes of Baldur’s Gate also pale in comparison with those of Shadows of Amn. We have even decided to light our nighttime forest areas as we do our city areas. Though we have had hefty computer upgrades (multiple Dual PIII 500 with 512 Megs of RAM) city renders still take a long time, e.g. - eighteen to twenty-four hours.
Building a complex and interesting city is perhaps the most challenging part of the artistic process and, for this reason the most rewarding to see finished. Baldur’s Gate was our first foray into city building and all of the lessons learnt from the process have made the city of Athkatla far more diverse and interesting. This coupled with all of the other changes to the Bioware Infinity engine and the design process in general, make the world of Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn, a fascinating place to explore.
-- Marcia Tofer, Art Director
And if you liked what you read here, be sure to check out the other Baldur's Gate Developer Journals on IGNPC:
Developer Journal: Baldur's Gate II, pt. 1
Developer Journal: Baldur's Gate II, pt. 2
Developer Journal: Baldur's Gate II, pt. 3
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