Art
Breakdown – Wicker Substance Material
I needed a wicker substance material for all the baskets I was making for Rome: Fantasy Packs I and II. Substance Designer to the rescue! This one was 100% procedural. This was fun to do. Since the wicker pattern is lower frequency, you can dial in a greater amount of detail. For patterns like this, it’s super vital that you have a tile generator/random on the side that can do color randomness so you can later directionally warp the albedo map, making it look more 3d. Getting the shades of brown wasn’t too tough, but mixing in that purple proved […]
Interview on 80 Level
Kirill Tokarev was kind enough to interview me for an article on 80 Level. I spoke about my work experience, how I approach 3d art and materials, and some good traditional philosophies for developing artwork.
Unity Blog: From Art Director to Asset Store Publisher
Unity was gracious in writing a wonderful blog post about my journey from AAA to self-employed. You can read it here: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/04/16/from-art-director-to-asset-store-publisher/
On Competition in the Game Dev Space
Why are you competing? This is art, not a competition for survival. I often read how your design/art/code/game needs to be better than the other guys’ or you’ll just get put into obscurity and irrelevance. “Do your best, then do better than that! Look at all these other people who killed themselves making their game. They are the example. You’ll have to go bigger now.” Working in the industry for over a decade, I’ve heard from upper management saying something similar like, “We need to beat Call of Duty and Gears of War!” Directives such as this are ultimately stupid […]
I Quit!
Buh Bye After almost 13 years of being part of Ubisoft’s biggest games, I’ve decided to resign. I will be working for my company, Quantum Theory, full time starting 4/10/2015. In recent years, the game industry has a made a dramatic shift in accessibility for ambitious developers. The cost of development has hit the floor. Publishing a game has gone from tens of thousands to almost free. Advertising costs to get your game in front of millions are almost non-existant. Games that are profitable and enjoyed around the world are now commonly made by small groups, sometimes even an army […]