Sit down with Environment Modeler Eric Sherwood and get an inside look at how he takes the University of Minnesota stadium and recreates it...in the game!
The process of creating a stadium is a long task, it takes almost 2 months, to build a NCAA stadium (not counting all the debugging and testing time) and get a polished, shippable stadium. First we gather reference and information on the stadium; in the case of Minnesota, as with most stadiums, we did a photo shoot of the new stadium and got schematics breaking down the layout and giving us measurements of the facility. In the photo shoot we try and capture as much information as possible, from taking pictures at the field level to up in the press box. After that we start modeling the stadium based off of camera matches inside Maya so that we know the scale and relative size is correct. The images for the camera match are taken from photos during our photo shoot.
Above is a "wireframe" of the camera match inside Maya.
Above is a schematic of the stadium layout
Once we have the stadium blocked in and know our layout is correct we start adding in all the details to the scene. We model out as much information as possible within our budgets for the scene, from edge wall tunnels, to the interior of the press boxes, and everything in between.
After the modeling is finished we move onto texturing the stadium. For texturing we will try and use information from the photo shoot when applicable, during the photo shoot we will take close up pictures of just the brick or concrete to then use those images in our scene so they match the real life reference as much as possible. This process is usually as time consuming as the modeling, both being around 3-4 weeks. In the end of the texturing process we will have all the materials in the stadium, from the base color, dirt on walls, and self shadowing of the objects. The last step is for lighting to light the stadium, where we apply shadow information, illuminate scoreboards, and assign light intensities. After all of these steps, the end result is a polished stadium similar to the others you have seen in NCAA.