As the Character Materials lead for Dragon Age: Veilguard, I overhauled the skin treatment for characters to increase visual quality and to be more inclusive of all skintones.
Originally skin only covered a range from pale peach to mid brown. The lighting team believed it was too difficult to light any skin darker than medium brown.
If the goal is for players to create characters they can identify with in the game, human skintones need to cover the full range of appearances that are possible on Earth. In Veilguard, we also had new art direction for elves to have slightly golden-greenish skin and dwarven skin to trend towards blue-purple. Qunari in the Dragon Age canon have skin that ranges from olive to dark brown and pale blue-grey to black. Our skin shader and character lighting needed to account for user choice in all of these ranges.
For the first time in a BioWare game, Veilguard offers a melanin mask which is tuneable by the player. I set it up to ensure that characters can have an uneven distribution of melanin across their skin, for example to account for pale palms and feet on dark-skinned characters.
I advocated for a broader range of human skintones, and studied the lighting techniques that photographers and cinematographers use to get a full range of tones. It’s important to avoid crunched shadows on dark skin, but if the lights are bright enough to fill out the shadows, they tend to blow out pale skin.
We developed new techniques of adjustable lighting that depended on the main character’s chosen skintone. We also adjusted other skin characteristics, like smoothness and subsurface influence, depending on skintone.
I have a patent filed through EA in 2023 for the skin rendering techniques.
2016 I created the procedural map generator which was behind the blue holographic maps in Mass Effect Andromeda. The core functionality operated in Houdini, with a Frostbite wrapper and GUI to make it easier to export levels for map generation. There were two types of map: large outdoor areas composed
2024 I was responsible for character materials in Dragon Age: Veilguard. Our character creator was one of our headline features, and we wanted to give players as broad a range of inclusive options as we could. Throughout production, I advocated for players to have exposure to maximum customization options. Those
I’ve been involved since the early days in EA’s R&D related to integrating Houdini with their Frostbite Engine. I started working with Houdini professionally in 2006, as a Render TD in animated film. Later, on the Tiburon studio team at EA, I worked on the development of a Houdini head
A few of the pipeline tools I’ve created. All tools and code on this page copyright © Electronic Arts. Madden 15 Houdini Head Tool Houdini with Python Madden Football, Tiburon, Electronic Arts, 2014 Madden 15 included significant improvements in the likeness of coaches and star players. Coaches and players were
2017 Lighting technology Mass Effect: Andromeda used the Enlighten lighting system, and I was the primary tech art contact for debugging artist issues related to Enlighten. For performance reasons, most of the game environment used Static Enlighten lighting bakes. Each game asset needed Enlighten geometry to be authored according to
Before I moved to game development in 2008, I worked as a Render TD and a Lighting and Compositing artist for feature film. Here are some example shots where I was responsible for sequence or shot lighting, and compositing. Kung Fu Panda Sequence lighting and compositing Open Season 2 Sequence
