Video Game Artist

I’ve done a ton of character design in my career so just sort of lumped a bunch of them here.

A tiny sampling from the gobs of artwork I’ve got scattered around.

Junk Town – development time: 8hrs.

This one was a lot of fun and just popped out with no drama.

Tank and Cross – development time 45 min.

Lot’s of use of custom brushes made this a breeze, maybe that’s why I like it.

Standing Street – development time 16 hrs.

Country Road – development time 8 hrs.

Another lighter image that was pure fun to work on.

Metaspace – development time 4 hrs.

Sitting – development time 8 hrs.

Just a sketch really, but I like the colors/lighting.

Wharf Night – development time – 14 hrs.

Had a lot of trouble with this one; got lost in the detail and ruined it.

Ore Processor Color – development time 10 hrs.

Not my fondest memories. This project took three years while we built our engine from scratch. Trying to art direct this while also doing all the concept work and being a full time environment artist, designer, and UI artist nearly killed me.

Man I really should have taken some of my own screen shots.

And a couple of costume designs.

Various other concepts

Here are few screen shots of really old work.

X-Men 2 was developed by my company Headgames.

Chakan was a fun project because I got to make up the look of everything! Sadly though the best levels never made it into the final product.

Dithering looks horrible here but it worked really well with the NTSC smear.

This was an early prototype level I created in order to illustrate how we might be able to create urban environments with believable roadblocks.

This was a quick sketch that was used to communicate a level layout concept: how to create a space that had a lot of game play packed into a small piece of terrain.

The player first enters the space (A) and can see their goal (E) through the locked iron gate. Now the player is diverted into a cafe (B) where they would enter into a firefight with enemy units across the river (D). Next the player moves to (C) where once again the path is blocked. The player then jumps the river and fights his way to (D) where he becomes engaged in a firefight with newly arrived enemies at the café (B) thus changing the feel of the firefight while still taking place within a fairly small piece of geo.

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On Blood Omen 2 a fellow designer was struggling to define the space for a puzzle that he was working on and asked for my help. Here are some of the drawings that I made in order to help him plan out his architecture.

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This line drawing was done for a Yacht galley for an unreleased Bond game. I was striving to do a sketch that would allow the level artist to construct the space with the minimum number of questions/unknowns.

These are some tests I did in trying to figure out just how complex a space we might make out of prefab mesh pieces.

Here I wanted to use those initial pieces combined with a few more to make a more interesting space.

This images shows how one might go about creating 3d tiles for an organic river valley.

This is a room I built for an IGC that took about 3 days while I was also spending about half my time doing storyboards.

I deliberately used a lighting model that would match the look of an in-game asset.

For a brief period our studio was working an a 3rd person Call of Duty game with a working title of Call of Duty Devils Brigade. We had a pretty meager staff and only had a few months to work on it before they pulled the plug…

Courtyard Visual Target

This started as a test to see how easy or hard it would be for me to grey-block out an urban environment that felt fairly organic inside Radiant. I started by finding two painting of an Italian village then blocked out the space and added some basic lights in an afternoon. It was actually easier than I had hoped. I then broke this thing into two pre-fabs so that our two environment artists could work towards creating an in-game quality bar target. I was also curious to see how well the styles would mesh.

Pretty! We never got around to cleaning up some of the transitions.

Some battle damage.

3rd Person Demo

This was our first milestone for Call of Duty – Devils Brigade. It was done with an art staff of 4 (one being a newly hired character artist), junior designers, and minimal engineering support. It was mostly intended as showcase for our squad based orders system. We spent about 6 weeks creating art assets for this including our new soldier models, and most of the environmental details. There are a lot of things about this fall short of where we wanted to get but the one thing I feel that we spent time on that we got right, and turned out to be a nasty problem, were the bullet trails. Seems silly but vitally important in a 3rd person game.

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