The skills menu work began early on in the process of developing Skyrim and was changed and improved throughout the duration.
The very first step was to take Todd’s notes and put a visual stake in the ground we could build from.
I blocked in a very rough version in 3DS Max and animated the camera so we could begin the discussion about how this menu could work
There was always the idea of skills and perk trees as constellations (based on 3 from Oblivion) but it took on many different forms as we progressed.
At on point I was toying with the idea of the stars being distributed in the depth in space and only forming the constellation in the back out view but navigation felt to uncontrolled in that reality.
Early on I also tried to use Fume FX to create the nebulae using a sim with some decent results but the speed at witch I could create like this was limited due to the simulation time.
My first pass at pass at painting the oblivion constellations as nebula worked out pretty well so I decided to take that route. In some way I like these version better but I have to visually reinforce the colors associated with the different skill groups in the final painting.
Once I dropped my nebula paintings into the scene the final look of the menu started to come together.
At this point I was also iterating on the stars and lines and their animations so we could build the perk availability and unlocking UI mechanisms.
Once we has all of that I took some time to finalize the nebula painting and break them into layers to create parallax. The entire menu was one 3d file that contained the background, animating perk tree art, and nodes to attach the code built perk trees. As long as each piece was scaled from the center of the scene you would always see the layers line up correctly when you moved back to the origin in the menu.
As a nod to the heavenly nature of Sovengarde and the skills menu Noah Berry the environment lead and the artist making the Sovengarde skybox took my paintind and incorporated it subtly into the sky.
Once the game shipped we had to repeat the process on a smaller scale for the DLC monster form perk trees.
This is fascinating. I wish we had access to the original, natural nebulae version!
We Are What We Feel 