Edge of Reality (2002 - 2014)
Images for these games and a brief description can be found on the Edge of Reality website.
Shortly after moving to Edge of Reality in Austin I was asked to be the Lead Artist on Shark Tale and following titles. Most of the images shown from Edge of Reality games contain work that was done by other artists. As a lead, I did a significant amount of prototyping in order to establish the art pipeline, and I picked up as many of the miscellaneous art tasks that popped up in order to keep the other artists on task. I made hundreds of decisions on each game that impacted the look of these screen shots.
Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark
On this project the Lead artist position was divided between the lead animator, who was in charge of animations, characters, and cinematics, and myself, in charge of environments. The major challenge on this project was time - we had less than a year; team - we had to build the team from scratch; and story - this was a story based, character driven game, and we didn't have a story. We also did not have a character artist or a full time concept artist. What we did have were the assets from the three previous Transformers games, and an engine that worked. The game should be out soon. Since it has not been released yet, I cannot include screen shots. But here's one of the trailers:
Transformers coming soon
Mass Effect Trilogy
Another straight port. Our goal was to get the three Mass Effect games to use the same engine, so they could be bundled together. The biggest challenge for the art team was lighting - when we ported the first game to the newer engine, we were forced to make certain assumptions about the lighting on each class of objects. We were right about half of the time. We had to work closely with the programmers to fix each set of assets. The problem was more technical than artistic, and the final product was very close to the original.
Sims 3 and Sims 3 Pets
The Sims 3 projects involved new gameplay (because of memory constraints) but re-use of most of the same assets, with new HUD/UI. The biggest art challenge was making customizable assets like clothes, wallpaper, and pet fur work like they did in the PC game even though the tech was completely different. Since we couldn't display an entire town on screen at one time, we had to create a set of neighborhoods. Check out Sims 3 and Sims 3 Pets!
IGN Sims 3 Review
IGN Sims 3 Pets Review
Dragon Age: Origins
The goal on this project was to port a PC game to the PS3 and Xbox360. We had about a quarter of the memory that was used on the PC game, and we needed new HUD/UI. We poly chopped, reduced prop variety, reduced textures (and normalized pixel density,) re-lit, and matched the PC game in gameplay and visual integrity.
The Incredible Hulk
Different publisher - Sega; different movie studio - Marvel Studios; different generation of consoles and a much larger art team. So we had new challenges. Digital animation films generate a lot of great concept art, but films with actors do not. We were actually shocked by the lack of concept art that was available to us on this project after Shark Tale and Over the Hedge, but we did have a story outline, we knew the locations, and the characters were iconic Marvel characters with a few well-known actors thrown in. Since the bulk of the movie and game was going to take place in NYC, the lead environment artist and I went to New York for three days to take photographs. Before we left we asked the designers where they wanted us to concentrate our efforts. They drew a circle around Manhattan. Thanks a lot! I asked the cab driver who was taking us from the airport into town if he could help us photograph all of Manhattan, and he laughed...but then he suggested Grayline bus tours. We spent the next three days on top of double decker buses going all over Manhattan taking photos as fast as we could.
The biggest challenge we had making Hulk was that everything was destructible. No light maps. So we decided to make the environment as dynamic as possible. We had traffic patterns, changing time of day, pedestrians, and tons of destruction. I think if we had another week, we would have had rain and snow.
Since the Hulk could climb to the top of every building, we also had to develop a robust LOD system.
We also sent an artist to photograph the University of Toronto, another location from the movie. I had to write to the University police to assure them he was not a terrorist after they picked him up while he was taking photos.
We had over twenty artists, about half were new to the studio. We had a lot of training to do. We also outsourced a lot of art assets, so we had to manage that as well. I can't say enough about the talent, skill, creativity and commitment that each artist on this team contributed to this project.
Here is a cinema I made of a loading screen concept. I used 2D concept art from Matt Hall, and turned it into a slightly 3D image with a slow camera move. I thought it was much more dynamic that a 2D loading screen. The conversion took about a day. We didn't use it, but I think it has real potential, especially on next gen consoles and PC games.
Over the Hedge
Another Activision/DreamWorks game with great concept art and much of the same art team. The challenge here was how to make a game that takes place in suburbia. We used locations from the movie, but we added an amusement park to increase the variety of gameplay opportunities. We also added a demolition derby mini-game that was fun to play.
Shark Tale
For Shark Tale I had an outstanding team of artists when we started making the game. We also had wonderful concept art from DreamWorks, and we began the project with a month at DreamWorks. Pretty cool!
Stormfront Studios (1992 - 2001)
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Environmental artist, duties Included extruding the 2D maps from the game designers so they could be tested in 3D before production, and part of the team that completed four of the final levels in the game.
Even though we had great images from the movie as reference, it was still a challenge to build these sets for the game, because when you carefully put together assets from the movie it became apparent that they did not really fit together – the magic of movies! Here is a small cinema I rendered from the WeatherTop set I built for the game.
And here is another cinema I made from a 3D map I made of Middle Earth..
Other Projects
Artist on Eagle Eye Mysteries, Eagle Eye Mysteries in London, and Stronghold; lead a team of 2D animators for Tony LaRussa Baseball 3, also worked as an artist on Tony LaRussa Baseball 2 and 4; Converted the art for Andretti Racing on PSX to N64; artist on NASCAR '98 and lead artist in charge of the environments on NASCAR '99 and NASCAR 2000 for PSX, N64 and PC. Duties included scheduling and overseeing the production of the tracks, as well as production of some of the cars and special effects.
Although I no longer have much of the art I did for these games I would like to say that the limited memory for polygons and textures required greater discipline and the same imagination that contemporary console games require although the technical skill is very different. I did find a sheet of background images and a map I painted for Eagle Eye Mysteries in London.
