Game Of Thrones

We were approached by Aesop Agency to help them out with the artwork for the boxset of a little known TV series called ‘Game of Thrones’, having never heard of this, we were a little unsure of the project…. Sorry, couldn’t resist. Box artwork for GOT? Hell YES.

The project required a fully CG photoreal, print quality version of the the map table from Dragonstone isle, in all it’s insane detail.. Oh yes, and the four photo real ‘playing pieces’ representing the four key houses from the entire series. Cue some seriously intense modeling, followed by some serious texture work and rendering. We can happily say that Kettle are now walking encyclopedias of Westeros….

Technically there was several challenges with the map piece. There’s some seriously difficult shapes going on there, not least the sea carving. Time and budget being what they are meant smart design decisions had to be taken early on in the process. The bulk of the medium detail modeling being shifted over to smart tileable displacement of the mesh (the sea carving on the map is insanely detailed). We utilised ICE heavily throughout the entire process, proceduralising much of the layouts and build. Texture work relied heavily on the data generated through the displacement and ICE creation process, automating most of the masking / texture blends and allowing efficient use of tiled textures and UV layout.