Turbine just posted a new Developer Diary from one of their Worldbuilder team members, Environment Artist Dan Haard .  Dan gives a little behind the scenes glance at creating the lands of The Lord of The Rings Online`s Middle-earth.

My name is Dan Haard, and I am an environment artist for The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™ (LOTRO). My job is to create, among other things, the grasses, bushes, trees and lo, the very dirt that your character will walk upon as you adventure through LOTRO!

When tasked with creating environment assets for Ered Luin, I first stepped back and looked at the overall ambiance the team wanted to achieve in this area. My goal as an environment artist is to create world assets that not only work consistently with each other, but unify to give the place a distinct visual meaning; a story that even the rocks will tell. In the case of the highlands of Ered Luin, we wanted to tell a story of a frozen wild; a place set apart, as the natural boundary it is, from the rest of Middle-earth.

In any story, the devil is in the details. While looming peaks are the easiest way to describe a mountain range, the ground-level, more discrete environment assets I was to create also needed to reinforce this idea. They needed to match not only each other, but the dwarven city structures as well. Since these lands are mostly wild and untended, the scarce grasses, shrubs and tall trees all needed to make the dwarven strongholds feel nestled-in and tiny compared to the vast surrounding wilderness. We needed to show that while habitation was possible, it was not easy, and that venturing off the beaten path could mean a cold, lonely grave. One by one, we created pieces of under- and overgrowth that would help to convey this message.

Just as if I were actually landscaping my own home, I started from the bottom up. I first created terrain textures of frosted grass, solid snow, and frozen dirt to allow for varied terrain types. It was important to allow for different states of freezing ¨C white snow offers a distinctly different ambiance than either slushy snow or a more lightly dusted earth. My goal was to create only a few textures that, when combined appropriately, would allow for the largest array of climate variance.