As a big fan of the Witcher 3 game, I was very excited about the opportunity to work on this project. I became a fan of the Witcher books too, after getting through all of the audio books in just a few weeks of working on the show. So having gained that extra context I was even more thrilled to get to work on the creation of the city of Cintra.
First I was tasked with the modelling of the buildings which would populate the city. I didn't have concept art to follow, so I was designing and modelling on the go. However I was given reference of existing cities, such as Dubrovnik, in Croatia, which had architectural styles we wanted to take inspiration from. Cintra has three separate tiers, with the buildings in each tier taking on their own styles to represent the difference in wealth/class between tiers. The idea being the fancier, stone buildings were situated in the central "Top" tier. With the buildings getting more run down, until they were cheaper shacks in the lowest tier on the outskirts of the city. So i got to have a bit of fun making enough variations of medieval buildings to suit each tier.
Next up was the city walls; each tier was surrounded by a ring of fortified walls. The blocking and overall layout of the walls had been done before me, I went in and modeled more detailed, modular wall pieces and used them to rebuild over the blocked out version. Also rebuilding the towers and gates situated along the walls.
In addition to the buildings and walls, I did some modelling and texturing on some of the other parts of the city, such as the terrain for the top/central tier, as well as a ramp that joined the middle and outermost tiers. The texturing of the building was shared among a few artists, so I got to texture some of the buildings I modeled.
Aside from the work on Cintra, some of the other highlights included modelling Geralt's sword, which was used in the awesome fight scene at the end of the first episode (the breakdown for which is in the video at the top), and also modelling/texturing the wizard Stregabor's tower.
Another asset I had some fun making was a rope bridge connecting the buildings on the rocky islands of the academy of Aretuza. Which we see some of the students crossing over a rough sea. I built the bridge using MASH, inside of Maya. When i started modelling it, the models for the buildings and rocks hadn't been laid out in relation to each other, so to build a bridge between them when we didn't know the distance was a bit of an issue. With MASH, I made a few variants of some planks of wood, and ropes, which would distribute along a curve, with a ramp linked to control the randomness of the distribution of the different pieces. Keeping everything live meant i could change the start and end points of the bridge by editing the main curve points, and also adjust how much it drooped over the water. Meanwhile the scale of the planks and ropes would remain consistent no matter how long the bridge was. So later when the buildings were positioned I could adjust my bridge quickly, without remodelling or UVing. So despite a fairly simple end result it was a fun process to build.
Read more about Framestore's work on the first season of The Witcher here.