Impostering in Simsville

Not a day goes by that I wish I could of played Simsville.  Too bad it was canceled.  Spore’s art director Ocean Quigley shares a moment of his time to show us what he accomplished in the game.

I’d just finished up SimCity 4, where we’d made our buildings using this technique called “impostering”. It involved building out really detailed models in 3DStudio Max,  rendering them out to sprites, and then applying the sprites to simple geometry (often not much more than boxes).
For SimCity we used the simple geometry to sort the buildings, so that they would have 3D shapes instead of being flat textures.

But impostering can do lots more. The camera can move around within constraints, and the simple geometry makes the textures look like really complicated models. And it allows for all kinds of illustrative styles in a 3D world, because the elements are really just fancy sprites.