[1999 - 2004]

I was fortunate enough to work on many games from pinball simulations through shoot’em ups to tactical shooters. Unfortunately most of them got canned after a while (and I can’t show ingame shots due NDA limitations). Nonetheless I learned a proper workflow which made level and game design work easier as well as content creation.

The first step is always a plan of the map I want to make, like these:

Rendering a flyby (like this) is useful if the game engine is not in the condition to run the game even with stand-in assets. (The numbered pins in the animation indicate key events/objectives.)

After the basic structure of a level is defined, the next task is placing stand-ins of the most critical objects and implement gameplay. I love to experiment with stuff at this early stage of the map, because I can really focus on gameplay.

The workflow is similar when I’m making art assets. Although I’m not so great drawing freehand, but I still used to sketch up things like this spaceship for a sidescroller:

Modelling is the easier part.

When it comes to texturing I like trying out new methods. Back in 2000, when surface baking wasn’t common practice I made a script which turned a UV into actual geometry. I put details to the geometry, rendered it and tweaked in photoshop.

Which looked like this on the actual model:

Of course making art assets is not just about texturing solid objects: making special effects is a very interesting task. In UnrealEd testing particle textures and tweaking emitters are easy. Sometimes we need fancy dynamic effects like in MetaBall:

Other times the challenge lies in making a rich but efficient foliage:

I used to model and texture objects in Lightwave and Modo, but moving art assets to 3DS Max and Maya is no problem. I used 3DS Max primarily as a level editor. I designed a series of max script system which turned 3DS Max into a quite sophisticated, specialised level editor. In Lightwave I did the design and the implementation as well.

Good ol’ times… Finally here is a building I modelled back in 2001.

And no, I can’t explain the reflective ground.