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 who don’t want to dive into the character creator can select a preset, but those who care can easily spend hours creating their own unique Rook. Each option, like tattoos, body and face paint, makeup, and scars, offers a range of attractive presets. Beyond that, the masks are broken down further into color channels, so players can select colors for individual regions, as well as smoothness and glitter.
All features are performant within the scope of the game. For example, glitter uses a fake fresnel effect calculated using a custom normal map with two colors applied at different camera angles. That creates a shimmery effect that changes as the character rotates.
A common mistake, even with real makeup brands, is to focus the majority of their offerings on pale skintones. For Veilguard, it was very important for us to offer a range of presets and options that were attractive on all complexions. We offer players a color palette, but every color can have its saturation and brightness level adjusted to complement the character’s skintone.
Scars can be tuned by intensity, discoloration, and smoothness, which affects both the underlying normal map and the colors around it.
2024 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
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
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
