The Art Direction challenges of the Third Crusade. CGSociety talks to the Ubisoft concept team.
ssassin's Creed,' is a game where a Crusades-era hit man stalks and kills targets. The beautiful
cinematic for the game was released in May and
was downloaded more than 1.25 million times in
six days. The game itself is staged as the Third Crusade engulfs the Holy lands. The player takes on the role of Altair, an assassin assigned to 'take out' targets on both sides of the conflict, with a mixture of guerilla tactics and acrobatics.
With 'Halo 3' now released and hotly pursued, everyone will be watching for the impact of 'Assassin's Creed' in mid-November. The game will be available for the XBox 360, PS3 and PC.
Raphael Lacoste has just completed a stint as the Art Director of the Assassin’s Creed game. Raphael has an impressive career as photographer and set designer in a theater company in Bordeaux, France. Qualified in CG, Fine Art and Media, he started as Environment Artist at Kalisto Entertainment in 1999.
After three years of focusing on whole environments, including lighting and volumes, in a job that gave him great artistic freedoms, Lacoste had a call from Yannis Mallat, wanting to employ him on the ‘Prince of Persia’ adventure. “I jumped on a plane to Montreal with my girlfriend,” he explains. “We still live here with our three year old son and soon a new baby girl.”
The core team from ‘Prince of Persia’ went on to begin work on the concept of ‘Assassin’s Creed’ and tried to create a new concept of a living, breathing world, one that was fully interactive. Lacoste joined the High Resolution Cinematics Studio at Ubisoft as Art Director with a brief for ‘Assassin’s Creed.’
There was also an incredible team of concept artists during the preproduction stage. Masters like Nicolas ‘Sparth’ Bouvier, David ‘Vyle’ Levy, Thierry Doizon, Patrick Desgreniers and Khai Nguyen. “This great team developed a lot of very different orientations for the style,” exclaims Lacoste. “They did an amazing job, very useful when I was involved in this production. Nicolas Cantin was directing this team and not only did a lot of research on this period of the Third Crusade but also in the historic aspect of the cities and characters.”
It took some time for them to not only define the setting and style of the game, but also the tools to make it! While the team definitely took some liberties when it came to scale, and bulked up much of the architecture when it needed to be menacing, all of the work was based on architectural blueprints, photos, historical descriptions, objects and decorations found in museums.
“’Assassin’s Creed’ was probably one of the most challenging projects I’ve ever worked on, especially regarding the balance between fantasy and hyperrealism,” says David ‘Vyle’ Levy. “The difficult balance that the concept team was trying to reach was one of a very ‘edgy’ mix of an ancient culture, depicted with a very modern, graphic, visual language.”
In the end, the setting became historical and not as much fantasy as ‘Prince of Persia.’ The developers and the concept team worked with historians, used tons of documentation, in order to be as close as possible to historic events and settings.
Nicolas ‘Sparth’ Bouvier was brought onboard Ubisoft very early in 2003 to gather together the concept art team. “Ubisoft has always drawn a very close attention to ‘Assassin’s Creed’,” explains Sparth. “and as a result, the concept design section grew quickly, providing a lot of visuals not only to the 3D artists, but also to the creative direction for inspiration.
I started on the project at the same time as Thierry Doizon, and then my other friends David Levy, Nicolas Ferrand, and Sebastien Larroude came along in the adventure, as well as many others.” This was a period of passionate experimentation, where the team provided a lot of materials revolving around game content, but also marketing art.
Sparth’s main task was to take care of the game environments, the town/port of acres for example that appeared in the main trailer, but also many different locations found on the hero's path. “I also did a few templar character studies,” he says, “as well as objects, but I spent most of my time on scenes and atmospheres.”
The story
So the story goes, the Assassins really did exist in the Twelfth Century, (Alamut) and the action takes place during the Third Crusade. In the game play, you travel during your mission between real cities like Acre, Damascus and Jerusalem, supposed to look as they were in Palestine at the time.
The Assassin’s Creed challenge that lay ahead for Raphael Lacoste was to reintegrate the team and to impose a vision for the style of the environments. “The team wanted to keep the historical aspect but I also wanted to stylize,” he explains. “As the environments are fully interactive, I had to challenge the level of design all the time and find compromise to reach this beautiful and also fun environment! We tried as much as possible to keep the interesting picture composition, a nice range of details, realistic lighting and a good sense of depth.”
ssassin's Creed,' is a game where a Crusades-era hit man stalks and kills targets. The beautiful
cinematic for the game was released in May and
was downloaded more than 1.25 million times in
six days. The game itself is staged as the Third Crusade engulfs the Holy lands. The player takes on the role of Altair, an assassin assigned to 'take out' targets on both sides of the conflict, with a mixture of guerilla tactics and acrobatics. 
