ZACK DIXON

The first Navy Yard phase was done by a team of artists and developers directed by myself. But by the time the second phase of the Navy Yard project was intended to start, the original stakeholders were forced to give up their IP. Which in turn, meant total loss of the Navy Yard creative team aside from key players. As the creative director on Phase 1, I was the most familiar with the pipeline and methods developed to construct the first phase. So I became solely responsible for modeling, environmental design and interactive programming. The upside, however, was that I now had the opportunity to improve a pipeline that was previously locked. I also had the benefit of detailed site plans supplied by the architects, so I could finally sculpt the landscape according to the actual elevations planned. Unfortunately, greater detail also meant a much larger volume of geometry to work with. Building components in the CAD models took a very long time to simplify and process just to be lightweight enough to be rendered in realtime by Unreal Engine. And with the increased detail of the site plans, came a much higher expectation for environmental design accuracy. Custom furniture and fixtures were not supplied by CAD models, so I modeled those based on the orthographic drawings found in the site plans and textured them as I saw fit. AI traffic ended up being much more difficult to work with, simply because this map lacked the logical simplicity of stoplights. Instead, AI cars needed to yield to stop signs and each other.