Professional Projects 2003 - 2011
Featured below are a selection of projects that I have been involved with in my career at Electronic Arts.
Coming off the back of Spare Parts, I was brought in to work on the latter end of the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt.2. game in Brightlight Studio. I was on the Boss Battle team looking into destructible environments. A relatively new concept for a Harry Potter game. We looked at a Maya plugin called Pull Down It by Thinkinetic. A physics based animation system. I cropped out the relevant scenery or created props to be destroyed, usually in a spectacular explosive fashion :) I also looked at refining or building the environments for these sequences to take place.
Above is one of the main areas I worked on, the arena design and placements, I also created the breakable cover scattered around the area.
Below are shots from various areas that I was involved in and responsible for in terms of destructive environments.
Below are shots from various areas that I was involved in and responsible for in terms of destructive environments.
Below are a few of the destructible props/cover objects and scenery I created for the game.
Below are some animation samples from the game that didn't get used because of time constraints. I created them using PDI (Pull Down It) for Maya. The exploding Courtyard was to be part of the final showdown with Voldemort and would be triggered when the locked wand beams collided with this side of the courtyard. Planned to be showpiece event during the boss fight.
The Arch destruction was to be part of sequence in the Ministry of Magic. A chase through the corridors, you would trigger these as you ran past and cast spells at them. The falling masonry would slow down your pursuers... I think you were to be chased by Voldemort in this section.
The Arch destruction was to be part of sequence in the Ministry of Magic. A chase through the corridors, you would trigger these as you ran past and cast spells at them. The falling masonry would slow down your pursuers... I think you were to be chased by Voldemort in this section.
While at Brightlight Studio this project became my first Lead Artist role. I was responsible for creating proxy levels for outsourcing as well as building a level myself and creating props and assets for the game. I also did level management/Asset placement and working with Concept team on design elements and creating Outsource briefs as well. I reviewed and fed back on all outsourced assets that came back to studio. Once the assets were back with us I would continue to polish them to their final shippable quality.
A selection of textures I created for the game. The art style was to be a painted illustrative style. Most textures where created by hand. Very little was created with a photographic ref as a base of any kind. The only real ref we used was created by the concept team and we based some of our textures off of those.
Zubo was the only DS game that Brightlight Studio published for EA. It was one of the highest rated DS titles released by EA at the time. My role on this project was the Primary World Artist (not Lead but the artist with the most responsibility for world/asset generation). I was responsible for liaising with the concept team and then turning their vision into a 3D world, but with a severely restricted budget on the Nintendo DS console. It was not a 3D machine as such and this made generating the worlds very challenging. I helped create an innovative tiling system that allowed us to create the large areas of world that did not break the rendering budgets of the DS .
Working as part of the Brightlight/Criterion partnership, we were tasked with making the last PS2/PSP Burnout title. I was in charge of creating a track called Spiritual Towers and designed and built the Autobahn circuit which was then outsourced and polished by another artist. I was also outsource managing assets and tracks, reviewing them and then providing feedback. Once the tracks that the outsources had completed where back with us we would then take them and apply the final polish to them with placements and scene composition.
Above are the other titles I worked on while at Brightlight/EAUK studios.
These titles were on a variety of platforms and in different disciplines from Gamecube to PSP. On Catwoman and Syndicate I worked as a Lighter only, on Burnout Legends it was optimization work to get the original PS2 environments to work in budget on the PSP. Need for Speed: Shift was the PSP game and I was in charge of building 1 track "Big Sur" and also polishing outsourced tracks which included the "London" and "Tokyo" tracks to shippable quality. Harry Potter: Prisoner of Azkaban involved both Level building and lighting and prop creation. Harry Potter: Goblet of Fire was a conversion of the PS2 version to the PSP a similar exercise to the Burnout Legends project, it did however contain PSP exclusive content (levels/gameplay).
These titles were on a variety of platforms and in different disciplines from Gamecube to PSP. On Catwoman and Syndicate I worked as a Lighter only, on Burnout Legends it was optimization work to get the original PS2 environments to work in budget on the PSP. Need for Speed: Shift was the PSP game and I was in charge of building 1 track "Big Sur" and also polishing outsourced tracks which included the "London" and "Tokyo" tracks to shippable quality. Harry Potter: Prisoner of Azkaban involved both Level building and lighting and prop creation. Harry Potter: Goblet of Fire was a conversion of the PS2 version to the PSP a similar exercise to the Burnout Legends project, it did however contain PSP exclusive content (levels/gameplay).