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RESPONSIBILITIES
Game Artist
Game Artist
- Responsible for the creation of and iteration on all dynamic materials (water, fire, particle systems, post-process materials, foliage movement, etc)
- Contributed to concept art development during pre-production, and throughout the project as needed
- Created a modular kit of assets for level designers and artists to use in building levels
- Responsible for lighting levels, as well as troubleshooting performance as needed
- Responsible for final passes on level aesthetics
- Assisted with bug fixing
- Assisted with UI creation (the HUD)
- Onboarded other artists into the process of working in engine, within level streams, to adjust level aesthetics
- Contributed to the Art Style Guide
- Created basic Lighting Guide for the use of all artists at our school (can be found HERE)
- Assisted with creating marketing materials (main banner and poster variants)
CONCEPT ART
I assisted with environmental and VFX concept art, iterating on possible designs for the interactable objects in the game, as well as their associated effects. I also did an early iteration of the character design, before Clayton D'Mello (Art Lead) took over for the majority of character work.
I assisted with environmental and VFX concept art, iterating on possible designs for the interactable objects in the game, as well as their associated effects. I also did an early iteration of the character design, before Clayton D'Mello (Art Lead) took over for the majority of character work.
MOD KIT I created the primary mod-kit for level designers and artists to use in building the levels. We used 256cm as our standard floor size, and created 128cm and 64cm variations as needed. The modkit included primary meshes (such as floors, walls, corners, trims, stairs, door) as well as secondary decorative meshes (pots, pillars, foliage, destroyed variants, rocks). We chose to keep our geometry large and exaggerated to reinforce the feeling of being a very small frog in a very grand (ruined) temple, and kept the textures quite simple, relying instead on geometry and lighting to convey a simple and lighthearted atmosphere. Displayed meshes were modeled and textured by me. |
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MATERIALS
Much of my time in the earlier sprints was spent creating and iterating on various materials for the environment, primarily for the water assets, as we knew from the start that the project would be heavily focused around the use of water, as well as setting up a post-process material that would allow us to utilize a cel-shaded lighting approach.
Much of my time in the earlier sprints was spent creating and iterating on various materials for the environment, primarily for the water assets, as we knew from the start that the project would be heavily focused around the use of water, as well as setting up a post-process material that would allow us to utilize a cel-shaded lighting approach.
I used Simon Trümpler's Stylized VFX in RIME talk as the basis for setting up both the torch fires and waterfalls which are prevalent throughout the game. We determined early on that we wanted to look at games like RIME and Zelda for the artistic style, so I attempted to recreate some of their strikingly graphic visual effects, relying more on flat color and movement than on detailed texturing or models.
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At first, I used two planes set perpendicularly to each other, so that the fire wouldn't disappear when the player looked at the torches from the side. However, when you rotated the camera, it was fairly obvious that there were two intersecting planes. |
Next, I tried using a curved plane to simulate depth when looking at the fire from the side, however it was also immediately obvious that the fire was going up a flat plane.
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I was able to get the effect I wanted by applying the fire material to a particle system locked to the z axis (to keep the particle from rotating up to face the camera if the player looked down on the torches), however once I determined that billboarding a particle would give me the look I wanted, I took the curved plane I had been using previously, and billboarded that to orient itself based on the camera position (and similarly locked to the z axis). This gave me the look of the particle system, but more cheaply. |
Since we had a lot of these torches throughout the levels, I offset the start of the panning movement of the flames based on world position, as the repetitive movements would have been obvious with so many of the fires in close proximity to each other.
Interactive material display
WATER
In La Rana, there are two types of water: clean water which is safe to touch, and poison water, which will "kill" the player. I used dramatically different hues (cool blues/greens vs warm purples/reds) to convey the difference between the two, using the same master material for both, with an additional particle system layered on top of the poison water to create a frothy bubbling effect.
Interactive material display
WATERFALLS
Our waterfalls use the same base material as the water, with additional vertex colors to control position and amount of the foam distortion, as well as a splash particle and ripple material. |
The waterfalls consist of 5 components: the impact splashes, the falling splashes, the particle splashes, the waterfall body, and the impact ripples (as shown to the left). Although using world displacement required the waterfall meshes to have a higher vertex count, I rigorously stress-tested performance prior to implementing the meshes in game, and frequently thereafter, checking FPS and GPU performances to ensure that FPS remained above 60, and we never found ourself GPU-bound. |
All four of the mesh components utilize panning noise textures and vertex color to determine which parts of the meshes distort.
CEL SHADING
For the cel-shaded material, I started out with Thura Oo's Semi CelShade PostProcess Material. However, I wanted more control over individual components of the scene, looking at games like Breath of the Wild or just about any Anime-inspired movie, where the main characters and the items they interact with are clearly distinguished from the background through the use of value and lighting. We had a very small character model in comparison to the rest of the world, and I wanted to ensure that the player never lost track of where they were, or what they should be going to and interacting with. I also set the material to render Before Translucency, so that it did not interfere with the rendering of the many translucent objects we had in the levels (such as god rays and water). |
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I separated the different scene components out into stencil groups (the frog, the snake statue, the baseline scene, and the softer background), and then assigned unique cel-shading arrays to each stencil group. This let me control all the parameters of the cel-shading effect individually for each group, increasing the contrast for meshes in the foreground (such as the water fountains), and reducing the effect on objects farther away (such as the ceilings).
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VERTEX PAINTING To create variation in the walls and floors, I set up one master vertex paint material, with instances for each particular combination, using height maps to lerp between the textures. We had an instance for stone bricks to sand, stone bricks to rock, and stone bricks to water. To ensure that the textures tiled seamlessly even when the UV scale was adjusted, I took the object XY world position and divided it by the standard mesh size (256cm), then added that back to the texture coordinate. All textures used for these materials were created by me, using sculpts from Zbrush with additional painting editing in Photoshop. |
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Full vertex paint material |
LIGHTING & WORLD BUILDING
I was responsible for setting up the initial Vertical Slice room to set the visual tone for the rest of the game. Clayton D'Mello (Lead Artist) created the main doors and frog statue, and Kate Blackshear (Artist) was responsible for the foliage meshes and bowls used. All other meshes and materials in the scene were created by me, and the scene was put together by me with our Lead Artist's oversight and feedback.
I was responsible for setting up the initial Vertical Slice room to set the visual tone for the rest of the game. Clayton D'Mello (Lead Artist) created the main doors and frog statue, and Kate Blackshear (Artist) was responsible for the foliage meshes and bowls used. All other meshes and materials in the scene were created by me, and the scene was put together by me with our Lead Artist's oversight and feedback.
Throughout the project I was in charge of setting up, building, and troubleshooting lighting for the entire game, as well as doing aesthetic passes once our level designers had finished gameplay setup. I was primarily in charge of visuals for the Starting Chamber, Level 0, Level 1, and Level 3, with our Lead Artist primarily working on visuals for the Finale room, and our other artists demodulating as needed to correct for lightmap artifacting.
HUD I worked with our lead programmer to implement the HUD. We wanted minimal UI elements so as to not distract the player from the environment, while still clearly conveying the player's current water level. |
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Since UMG has fairly limited options on what can be used for UI (no meshes, limited material node outputs), I had to adapt from my original plan of simply using a plane with distorted UVs to create the spherical water globe, and instead transform the planar UVs to spherical UVs.
MARKETING
I was responsible for the creation of poster marketing materials (one large banner, as well as three poster variants) over the course of 2 days, incorporating feedback from my lead artist to make adjustments as needed.
I was responsible for the creation of poster marketing materials (one large banner, as well as three poster variants) over the course of 2 days, incorporating feedback from my lead artist to make adjustments as needed.
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POST-MORTEM
- The artists were able to work together to maintain a cohesive style and manage work load, picking up and switching tasks as needed to meet deliverables.
- Establishing and keeping a consistent scale is crucial.
- Communication between disciplines and the leads (both to and from) is imperative to accomplishing tasks. Without a good understanding of what all disciplines are doing, and what the intention of each task is, it is easy to go off-track and make something that doesn't fit with the overall vision and design of the game.
- Understanding the difference between stakeholder suggestions and requirements is very important for prioritization; there are many features that may be desired, but do not fit in with the time scope of the project. Being able to identify what can and cannot be cut, and in what priority, is key to being able to deliver a final game that will be accepted and published.