Mark Teare

Nuka-World trailer featuring DLC cover art by John Gravato.

It has been a while since I have had the time to post and I wanted to get something up about Nuka-World. Rather than hit all of the details in a bunch of smaller Nuka-World posts I decided I would cover as much as I could in one overview post. While re-watching the trailer recently, I was reminded of just how many different aspects of that DLC I got to work on as the art lead. Highlighting my work from the trailer felt like a good way to run through my efforts, so take a look at the trailer linked above and then read on below.

Nuka-World screenshot I created for marketing.

My general responsibilities began with creating the pitch for the DLC. The two design leads, Justin Schram and Alan Nanes, and I started developing a series of ideas for the DLC. After one false start, we came in with a stack of new ideas as one-sheets and started the pitch meeting with what was then called “Raiders and Rides” as a working title. Todd accepted it before even hearing the other ones. I was very happy about this as it was my favorite pitch of the group.

Nuka-World screenshot I created for marketing.

As the art lead for the project I was responsible for overseeing all things art-related; art direction, pipeline, etc. Since this was a DLC for Fallout 4, much of the core art direction was established by Istvan Pele, the art director on the base game. My job for the DLC was to create a reason for players to want to come back to the game for more. I also wanted to test some of my ideas for improvements to the pipelines and the smaller scale of a DLC was a great place for that. More than anything I wanted to use my additional influence on the DLC to give the players loads of memorable fun and value for their money.

My Nuka-World key art based on the original Fallout 4 key art.

One of the first things I did once the plan was greenlit was to create the key art. I used it in all of my slides for internal and external presentations and to set the initial tone and pillars of the DLC for the team. More detailed post on the key art here.

My original Bottle & Cappy slide art turned into Nuka-World coffee mug art.

A key contrast built into the DLC from the start was the mix of horrible, violent, raider gangs with the fun, lighthearted, theme park. To add that contrast into my slides I created a closing slide featuring who I imagined the park mascots to be. Bottle & Cappy were born as a way to incorporate a fun note as my closing slide. As the DLC progressed it became clear we needed to use them in the park and then in the marketing. Post DLC they have joined the permanent Fallout lore in other titles and in merchandising.

Nuka-World screenshot I created for marketing.

As the first artist on the project, I started by sketching key broad strokes of the DLC into the engine to guide the art team toward my vision. I added in the first-pass landscape and weather to get the environment feeling like I wanted. Then I started blocking in key landmarks of the park in grey boxed art to get the layout started. I added sub leads for the park environment art (Jason Muck) and the landscape (Andrew Barron). To help build enough new geometry to fill the park, I prototyped some park assets using the color remapping I developed for the base game. This workflow would allow faster park asset creation allowing us to build a larger environment with a smaller team.

Nuka-World screenshot I created for marketing. 

Once the environment team was going I shifted focus to characters, creatures, and weapons. I knew they going to take much more hands-on work from me duse to the small team size. We had one character artist (Charles Kim) and one weapon artist (Dane Olds) in house. Concept art and the bulk of the non-environment art was planned to be outsourced. Raiders were the main focus for the DLC and I knew they would take up the majority of the resources. Inspite of that limitation I also wanted to get the players as many new creatures as I could. I came up with a list of easy but dramatic creature ideas to test to maximize reuse but feel new to the player. I did fast "proof of concept" tests for each idea to determine which ideas would work in-game. I repeated this same pattern to fill out the weapon list with cheap and fun additions at a minimal cost.

Nuka-World screenshot I created for marketing.

The raider gangs were the main feature of the DLC but due to the volume of work they required, and our lack of staff in those departments, the decision was made to outsource all of the raider concepts and the models. I knew outsourcing the concepts was going to be tricky since the outsourcing group was in China but I had no other option. I supplied lots of ref and photo bashed some quick collages to get something for them to start with besides a written description. This method yielded a few good designs but nothing good enough to move forward with alone. Luckily for me, John Gravato (concept artist) stepped up and took on wrangling some of the design revisions and additions in his spare time. Ray Leder (concept artist) also knocked out a few additional helmet designs. Leveraging their stellar support and iterating with the team in China I was able to arrive at the armor sets that defined the three raider gangs and could combine for massive variety for the player.

My trailer directorial debut: the Nuka-World E3 teaser.

For this DLC, in particular, Todd's plan for us was to market it like a full game. This meant we would work with marketing on screens, a teaser, a trailer, a theme song, a Bottle & Cappy trailer (similar to the SPECIAL videos for the base game), and a physical park map. The Bottle & Cappy trailer was handled by an outside vendor which took most of the load off of us except for lite direction and feedback. The rest was up to myself and a handful of people on the team. Animator Neal Thibodeaux did a lot of the heavy lifting on both the teaser and the trailer which were both made in the engine. Artist Natalia Smirnova created the logos and artwork for the map and we worked very hard to make it accurate to the park and have that authentic theme park map feel. Not only were we going to use it to guide people around the park in-game, we were also putting a physical version in Game Stop as a preorder bonus.

Bottle & Cappy trailer.

Nuka-World park map pre-order bonus.

One of the things that got me the leadership role on the DLC was my history of adding all kinds of content to the game in addition to my role as a VFX artist. I don't like it when a good idea dies from a lack of resource time. Over the years I have learned all of the workflows in our engine to find clever ways to make my ideas come to life without additional help. This often includes sourcing existing art for kitbashing new work from in order to save time. Unfortunately, this is the kind of work that has often proven hard to teach and or delegate. Having the lead role allowed me to incorporate it more than ever before into our pipelines, but throughout the DLC I still had to do a lot of the work myself.

Below is a breakdown of all of my work in the trailer which turns out to be a good cross-section of all of the additional things I did on the DLC.

00:02 Direction and feedback for outsourced Bottle & Cappy video.

00:15 Unique models and editor setup for Nukatron. Flipbook port of B&C video for in-game Nukatron and Nuka-Cola machines.

00:20 Water VFX for the landscape. Art direction for the five themed areas of the park.

00:23 Ported mannequin models to animatronics and animated them. Created all Nuka-World mannequin outfits as texture swaps or new meshes.

00:24 Set dressed and captured trailer footage in-game.

00:26 Developed efficient color remapping pipeline (CRP) for the fast creation of park assets. I built fake western mountain rocks for themed park area.

00:28 Created a quantum variant for all 6 Mirelurk creature types. Created the water and VFX for the Quantum river.

00:30 Concepted and built the armor for Porter Gage the main companion for the DLC. Modeled and posed Bottle& Cappy park sculptures (using CRP). Built the Fizztop Mountain asset for the main landmark for the park (using CRP).

00:40 Technical assistance on execution of the intro train ride.

00:42 Created park color guide and prototype weathers for DLC color direction.

00:43 Concepted and built Nuka bottle Protectron (using CRP). 

00:45 Art direction for park map and then execution of in-game navigation via map kiosks.

00:48 Created all of the painted feral ghoul DLC variants.

00:51 Created the Gatorclaw death claw variant model. Created a Nuka-World specific lunch box player prize system from my lunch box system in the base game.

00:52 Created the Brhamaliff models. Planned a high-level melee tree with art assets to supplement a limitation of the base game.

00:56 Created the unique robot meshes for Nuka Spray Mr. Handy

00:57 Designed the damage structure for weaponized Nuka-Cola flavors.

00:58 Created all of the western clothing meshes.

01:00 Prototyped the original sandworm concept in-game to test viability. Created the Sandworm VFX. Trained the character artist in kitbash modeling to add Acid Soaker. Created all of the VFX for the acid soaker.

01:03 Art directed the raider factions. Designed all clothing as armor/under armor for maximum mix and match. Cleaned up all outsourced outfit meshes for maximum compatibility within the armor system.

01:04 Created all texture variants for raider underclothes. Brought the slave collar from Fallout 3 and rebuilt for Nuka-World with power on/off functionality.

01:07 Added motion to some Bottle & Cappy statues.

01:09 Designed trash pile loot system to add the feel of overflowing trash at a theme park and add a new loot system to the park.

01:13 Concept and design for paddleball weapons and mods. (see other post)

01:18 Art direction for raider gangs.

01:19 Ported alien mesh to animatronic enemy for the park. Revised the Fallout 3 alien blaster as playable weapon (not shipped).

01:20 Built the Overboss bumper car power armor. Worked with design to create the plan for the opening boss fight with squirt gun mechanic (see other post). Built all of the electric VFX for the boss fight.

01:21 Original concept for spider cricket hopper enemy.

01:17 Tuxedo mesh for Kiddie Kingdom boss ghoul.

01:23 Flying swarm as a single enemy proof of concept. All ant variant meshes.

01:28 Shot this shot setup and set dressing for the teaser.

Skyrim Trailer: Shot 27

This was the final shot of the trailer and the vision from Todd and Rick was a long continuous shot showing the Dragonborn absorbing a soul and revealing another dragon soaring over the land of Skyrim. A poetic reduction of the game play loop we were developing. As it turned out this was one of the most difficult and time consuming shots of the trailer.

I started out by posing the dragon and a temp version of the actor in Max and getting a rough version of the camera flyby in for testing. I had to learn a lot from Rick and his experience directing commercials about long cg camera moves. #1 rule I learned: keep it simple. Fewer cleaner keys keeps a controlled move. Also being aware of real world camera moves helps keep the fake 3d feeling minimized.

The nice thing about having a controlled camera is I was free from the in game flexibility I needed for the dragon absorb VFX. Due to the locked camera I could port them into the shot in a very polished way. At times like this I felt like I might want to consider making games with less freedom for the player so I could make highly controlled VFX all of the time but then I remember how amazing it is to feel that freedom when you play games.

For the final version of the absorb VFX I spaced the timing of the different elements to hit on the musical moments. I also the the blood VFX on the character and set up the lighting for the shot to maximize his badassesness.

After leaving the character we needed to move the camera to show the dragon on the ruins and the valley. I built the dragon absorb scene into the mountain just be hind a rock wall that could give us that reveal. When working on the camera it became clear we could not jog too quickly to get there or it felt unnatural. To decorate this moment I did a lot with a handful of snow VFX. Snow blowing off the trees, de-focused flakes near camera, a flurry of flakes in the midfield, all have their little moment to make the fly over the rocks a little more interesting.

The dragon was originally set up as a real actor in the shot but he could never hit his marks. The AI had too much randomness for it to work. Luckily I had my ways of baking out the animation and rig so we could generate a trigger-able animated mesh. Unfortunately we could not do that for the player or we would lose facial animations so we had to work through a slew of head tracking and face issues to get the real player in his spot absorbing the dragon soul and NOT BLINKING.

Finally we had all of the elements under control. We then captured loads of takes to get every particle in it best place. When it finally was released I was extremely proud to show it to my family and my son melted my heart with his pride in my work:)

You can see more of him in the Lego reviews we made together or as “child being read to” in season 2 and 3 of House of Cards on Netflix.

Skyrim Trailer: Part 1

At the end of 2010 Rick Vicens started the effort to create the first full trailer for Skyrim. The plan was to create an all in engine trailer and cut it back and forth with the teaser Todd had shown to announce the game at the 2010 VGAs. By early 2011 several more of us with differing specialties had been pulled into the team creating the trailer. By the end of the work I had touched many of the shots in various ways including a ton of work on the infamous shot 27 (see part 2 coming soon).

The dragon flying low shot lacked a sense of speed so I built a cloud layer into our scene we had branched off to “film” the trailer in. To add a sense of danger to the unseen force behind the camera I created the fleeing flock of birds and pitched it to the team. They were happy with it so I built it into the shot. All animated assets in the shots had to be built with their timing in the animation because we had no tool for building the timing of the shot. The workflow for capturing each shot was to have a batch file to set the stage (swap armor, move actors) and then a second one to start all animations... brute force at its finest.

For the running to the edge shots I did a bunch of landscaping and FX placement to decorate the cliff edge paying special care to improve the closeup without introducing any “bullshot”. I added snow footstep FX directly to the player for the full body shots.

The dragon shadow shot was causing the team a lot of trouble because they were trying to use a real dragon actor to cast the shadow but the AI and other systems in the game were making it hard to get it perfect and repeatable. I built a simple rigged dummy dragon that we could animate just enough to get the sense of wing motion we needed for the shot.

For the closeup shots I added breath to the hero to show how cold it is in Skyrim. At the time the plan was to port this into the game for all actors but we never had time for it. The dragon fire was pretty much as is from the base game. Mark Lampert developed the sound FX for the fire breath for this trailer before it was ever in the game. As soon heard that sound over my FX I was sold.

I spent a lot of time layering in the details for the hero on fire shot until it was just right. Even capturing it was a process because of the random nature of particles. The second shot shown uses Grant Struthers’ shout FX.

This water shot is the only shot I am including in this breakdown from the generic in game footage shots cut in between the dragon shots. Most of these included very little or no custom work from the trailer team. When this shot was included I begged for time to polish the assets because they were not finished. I was told they looked fine and not to worry. When the trailer dropped this one one of the shots I saw the most criticism of. That really stung since it was full of my assets.  From that experience I learned to always trust my gut especially when it comes to FX quality in highly scrutinized work like a trailer. The first thing I did after that was a pass on every heavy waterfall/rapids piece in the game.

The sword fighting shots all needed blood. I attached a blood particle emitter to the sword itself and built in custom timing animation offsets for each shot. I added a second layer of the skin geometry that was pushed out a but from the surface and covered it in blood splatters. I could animate them on as the hero covered himself in glory and dragon blood. This was a know “bullshot-ish” asset but we had no decals in the trailer because the system that added those requires real damage to happen. In this case I was subbing in a faked system for a real one that would fill that slot in the game so I felt ok with adding it. We worked really hard to put our best foot forward and keep the trailer accurate to the players experience when the bought the game.

Takeoff FX and blowing snow added just to keep the energy up for the ending of this fight.

Final money shots for the hero fighting. I was really happy with the way the slice to the dragon covered the hero with blood and the breath and his heavy breathing takes the focus. The dragon crash in the second shot is just the one from the base game (see my previous post covering the dragon crash FX).

Skyrim: Alduin Death VFX

Opening up this post with a pics from Ray Lederer’s concept work and Jonah Lobe’s modeling work as a reminder these big set pieces are the culmination of a lot of different people’s work.

The main thought I had going into developing the VFX for this scene was Alduin was stealing souls so he must be a big magical sack full of souls and evil. That idea led me to start trying to have him shed his dry lava looking shell to reveal a putrid under layer.

Once I had that idea stubbed in I started trying to raise the drama in the scene. I added in the meteor storm spell that Grant Struthers had made for him to the script controlling the sequence. I also started fleshing out the sould escaping effect that starts once he loses his shell.

My final addition was an explosion at the end of the soul streaming part that vaporizes the shell bits on the ground. I always looks for the chance to have parts from earlier in a long fx sequence interact with parts that come later.

You can watch a YouTube video of the whole fight here:

And I noticed a few positive fan reactions in the comments as I researched for this post :):):):):):)

Fallout 4: TV Effects

For the opening scene in Fallout 4 we had Ron Perlman return and the voice of the newscaster reading the news while the bombs dropped. The task to create the newscast and make it look like it was on the TV fell to me. Unfortunately we were not going to support video as textures in the engine so I had to find a clever way to work around that limitation.

I had previously written a Max script to build stepped UV keys so I could put my flip book textures from particles onto geometry. Using this I could basically get video from After Effects to an animated texture in the game. To prove this could work as our solution I created a test space to record my video, baked out and quickly animated an actor, stubbed in the prop meshes and background map, and then put the resulting animation into a texture on the screen. I added a looping layer of screen warp and high res animating noise to create the look of the old television broadcast.

My first test included still frames as commercial to break up the broadcast because I had no idea yet how much time we had to fill if the player was not progressing the scene.

As the test footage of the news anchor sat in the game it became clear the looping animation was not in alignment with the dialog. I had hoped this would be small enough to get away with because of the crude implementation and lack of control it afforded. In the end it was not because this was something we were directing the player to pay close attention to.

With the help of Rick Vicens and the animation team we created a plan to fill the time with a series on mo-capped animations all ending in the idle pose shown in the picture at the top. The final lines would be one long unique animation mo-capped to match. It occurs to me this may be the only time in gaming history mo-cap was recorded for a texture:)

Along the way I had the idea to add in an old commercial from the Fallout 3 advertising instead of the still frames. Due to limitations in texture space I had to resort to cutting up loops from the commercial and then filling it the timing to match the audio.

Once we had the updated animation I rebuilt my fake actor asset as a real actor with better clothes and a baked out facegen face courtesy of tech artist Felipe Noguiera. Now we could play the animations and have his mouth move without hand animating it. We set up the mocap data and an idle and captured it as video in the engine.

The last step was to use the looping idles to match the Ron Perlman dialog as closely as possible. To do this we used the old brute force approach. I was currently crunching to finish VFX for the game so animator Barry Nardone stepped in to help. He loaded the lines into max and stitched together combinations of the looping idles to match each one.

Here are the final assets in game:

And people found my recording studio as well:)

#RealTimeVFX

Nuka-World Overboss Fight

From early in our planning for Nuka-World, Al Nanes (lead quest designer) and Justin Schram (lead level designer), were planning to flip expectations by having you defeat the raider boss early in the DLC. For this we needed a boss fight on a budget because we couldn’t afford to blow time we needed for the main asset creation on the DLC on the intro.

In early discussions about the park we had made a list of rides and one of them was bumper cars. It popped into my head that if we had a fight there we could have a gag where the enemy is powered from the ceiling like a bumper car. Within the lead group we were riffing on the idea and we had the idea to use the squirt gun base version of the Nuka Zapper to short out the defenses.

When starting the work on creating the armor I needed to address the biggest risk first so I blocked in the pole attach art and figured out the functionality that kept it always pointing up. I used the same camera facing node as the bugs in a jar from Skyrim which has the side effect of always pointing up. Once that was stubbed in and working the next item to solve was the look of the armor. It needed to feel like it could conduct electricity and resist lots of damage. I took the raider power armor by Ben Carnow, armored it up, and covered it in fencing.

Because I wanted the armor to also be an add to the players inventory and the rest went so quickly I took the time to build out a new helmet as a reward for the players victory.

Working with the level designer in charge of the fight (Steve Cornett) I planned out the FX for the armor. I built the shock FX to be a min/max blend driven by a float so we could have show levels of protection but as we tuned it it  became more of an on off situation for clarity.

In the end we got an early boss fight that felt different into the DLC with minimal art creation effort. I think we may be the first and only people to ever create a bumper car powered boss that gets undone by a squirt gun which always makes me chuckle.

Nuka-World Lunch Boxes

When it came to Nuka-World I had to bring back my pet side project from the base game...the lunchboxes (see earlier post for more on them). Using John Gravato’s Nuka Girl art and images of the different flavors from the game I created a variant of the base game lunchbox texture. I also adjusted the drop lists we used in the base game to be more rewarding and include Nuka themed loot.

Just like the base game I decorated some breakout boxed with stickers to add detail to the world and make a special one for each of my kids and wife.

Once Nuka-World was out I created a pitch for the merchandising department. I wanted to sell the new lunchbox and include a sticker pack to customize it just like the game. The origin of the lunchboxes with stickers was the real lunchboxes of my kids so I was tickled by the idea of that thread making its way back into the real world.

Thanks to the magic of Mike Kochis and his department of merchandising my idea became a reality, sticker pack and all. Special thanks to Yan Qin for the cutie version of my characters Bottle and Cappy and Natalia Smirnova for the Nuka-World logos used in the stickers.

Of course the fans do amazing stuff with it as usual.

Liar: Accidental Art Series 01

Some of you may have seen the Polygon article about Lair that came out recently. If you haven’t read it it is a decent representation of what went on during that time although there are some inaccuracies and the point of view is limited by the small set of people interviewed. Still I would say it is the best representation of my origin story as a developer.

Since Lair is back in the public discussion I figured it is a good time to start adding in a series I have worked on during Lair using the engine and one fabulous rendering bug. I call them the Accidental Art of Lair.

Basically the bug was all or certain parts of the screen were not rendering properly and would incrementally “stamp” the current image there. By moving the game or debug camera you could paint repetitious patters in these areas. I loved the visually it created instantly instantly combining the commercial and fantastic art of lair with the beauty of digital abstraction. As I write it now I realize those two descriptions are the main threads in my own artistic life as well:)

Some of these stand alone as compositions but other feel like they need to move on as parts of new artworks.

Nuka-World DLC: Key Art

At the very beginning of the Nuka-World DLC pre-production I needed to take the short written pitch we were green lit from and make an initial visual tool to communicate to the DLC team, and the rest of the studio, what we were aiming for. 

Since I am better at photo-bashing then painting and this was a DLC for Fallout 4 I started with my favorite Fallout 4 key art.

I painted out the character and dog because in this DLC you could reinvent yourself as a raider. I shifted the color pallet the the environment colors I wanted to use knowing the park would be full of Nuka Cola red.

In 3ds Max I blocked out a quick 3d file for the park with a couple key ideas that were in the early plans.

I used this file to quickly add the park to my image. This would later be the file I broke up into the initial blocked in landmarks I made to start sketching in the spacing in the in game world.

Once the park was in I wanted to show the heavy handed Nuka branding we wanted in the park and the surrounding areas. I converted everything I could to Nuka branded. As a juxtaposition for the happy presentation of Nuka branding I added the violent calling cards of raiders. This was a central contrast we wanted in the DLC going all the way to the original working name “Raiders and Rides.”

Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta...  Generator and Death Ray VFX

Activating and sometimes destroying generators was a game play mechanic needed for the DLC Mothership Zeta. I was handed the animating generator and switch art from Environment artist Cory Edwards (I think, he usually does all of the animated interactive environment stuff, but it has been a while). I built the coolant VFX using particles and hand placed collision then backed the floor portion of the VFX with a scrolling texture on a custom mesh to fill it out.

The generators were used for game play throughout the ship and needed to support turning of each side of the coolant individually to overheat and destroy them.

T avoid the confusion of the player figuring out how to read alien language the controls all had custom animated icon that informed the player what they did. Due to all of the rooms having transparent glass windows the “hologram” icons were unable to be transparent as it would sort badly at different angles.

For the death ray game play  we needed to also show the ray was charging up with each generator in the room so I added a scrolling VFX layer to the tubes connecting them to the ray that was enabled when the corresponding generator was activated.

The final piece of the scene was the laser firing and the subsequent explosion (the player could choose to miss earth but that required no additional VFX). I found a good spot on the planet to destroy and rebuilt my earth art in the sky dome to have the animation of the explosion VFX in it.

I also painted in a new patch of art showing the clouds and earth after the impact and faded that in as the VFX played leaving a visible mark from the players action.

Fallout 4: Nuka-World...Paddle Ball

Ever since I saw in SPECIAL videos we put out to promote Fallout 4 tell you not to use a paddle ball I had the plan to put a paddle ball weapon into the game. Luckily for me I was made art lead for the 5 the DLC and I was able to make my dream come true.

Once a crazy idea starts rolling around in my head I begin thinking of ways to make it happen. As soon as we made the plan for the DLC to be in a theme park I knew my idea could fit but I still needed to see if it would work. I made a temp projectile that animated out and back in as my 5 min POC.

From there it mostly went into the hands of Jeremy Bryant and Charles Kim to animate, model, and implement the base paddling functionality. There was a point in time where the first model came back as a ping pong paddle due to a little confusion but we got it sorted out without much waste since it was a simple model.

Once the real model came back and we could paddle with it Jon Paul Duvall started implementing the design. As a base weapon he had the idea of giving it low damage but a high chance to stagger. Not super useful until modded but it made sense for the weapon. Andrew Langlois was building out the Nuka-Cade so we decided it should come as a prize from there.

From there we needed to give the player a reason to use it. I had a plan for a series of mods that took it from spiked, to elemental, to explosive. I pointed Charles to the correct files so he could “remix” some meshes we had with some new modeling and get the melee and elemental mods. I added some FX to them.

The exploding version was  little more difficult to wrap my head around. As it turns out the answer was developed as part of Nuka-World as we went: weaponized Nuka Cola.

The three levels of weaponized Nuka Cola are regular, Cherry, and Quantum. We used the weaponized quantum bottle are to constantly fill sponges fixed to the with the explosive cola. The sponges stop the ball from exploding on the bounce off of the player.....video games!

Once we had the mod art for the nuka versions Liz Rapp ported over her FX from the Thirst Zapper for the 3 levels of cola destruction.

There were a few times along the way I thought it wouldn’t happen but thanks t a lot of hard work and help (special shout to Jeremy and Charles who kept it alive when I was doubting) we got it in.

Fallout 4: Confetti Mode

I made this for one of the Fallout 4 internal game jams. My hope was we could include it as a no blood option in the game for my kids to turn on and see daddy’s work. I even had my son come in to record some VO for it.

Decorating Dogmeat

There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those who put clothes on their dog and those who don’t. Somewhere along the way in the initial development of Dogmeat for Fallout 4 it was decided within the Dogmeat group we would not be dressing him up in game.

At the time I was a full blown dog hater (I have since been reformed by my wife and the amazing Pepper shown above). But even without a love of dogs I knew putting clothes on them would be a choice the player wanted, especially if you didn’t really relate to the breed of dog we were using like me. You could create your own connection with the accessories you chose.

To be 100% clear about the origins of this idea we need to go back to this painting by Ray Lederer (@RayLederer on twitter). He made this very early on in development of FO4 and set a great tone for Dogmeat including a red bandana.

One of the great things about our studio is the internal game jam. If you want to know more about it watch this talk by Todd (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7awkYKbKHik). If you have something you would like to see in the game the jam gives you a chance to pitch it to the team. One of the first things I did during the jam week on FO4 was dress up Dogmeat. I started with a rope collar.

As I was working on it I heard there were others interested in the idea and I linked up with Ryan Sears ( @r_sears on twitter) one of our environment artists who wanted to use the time to learn Marvelous Designer. He whipped up the bandana mesh and some textures and I threw it in the game as a skin.

As the final touch I whipped up the Doggles from a mesh we had in the raider set. As a lover of puns and probably subconsciously still thinking of Ray’s initial painting I knew they had to be made. Once they were seen by the whole team in the jam there was no way we were not going to add them to the game. Even the original naysayers were converted. Thanks to some existing functionality we had in the armor form we were able to get the goggles to load different meshes depending on the race so you could wear all of the dog gear as well.

As merch started being created for Dogmeat I was happy to see they latched on to the clothed version. Obviously the best one (and the one I own) is the PoP! one because it looks like Pepper:)

Skyrim: Creature Remixes

In games as large and expansive as Skyrim there is always a demand for more content. For each part a of development great consideration is given to how we can create the maximum amount of content from the production pass on the game. What I try to add on top of that is (hopefully) clever reuse of existing assets to solve specific problems or just squeeze out more value for the player from what we already have. One key example of this from my work is character “remixing.”

The origin of the character remixes came from my first job in the industry as a character modeller. As I was adding FX to creatures I was noticing some wasteful practices in the art and set about optimizing them. This was not a critique of the art it was all beautiful I just had fresh eyes and was able to see ways to improve the efficiency without compromising the in game result. I would run mesh reductions and re-skin heavy meshes and mirror textures. After any optimization I would create a side by side in game for the original artist to review to make sure quality was maintained. While the super high quality of the character art was not always necessary for the in game model I found that extra quality made the creatures hold up better during the various remixing techniques.

Frost Giant

The Frost Giant was the first time I attempted to use the technique of blending two creatures together to create a third. I had the idea of blending 2 or more and then baking the textures down using the same re-baking technique I used to mirror the dragons.

I found this old creature Karstaag as a guide. I then built a similar looking creature on the giant rig using the giant and the troll models by Jonah Lobe. For this workflow I worked entirely with the low poly in max but Jonah was not sold on the final quality. He helped my spruce up the final version a bit and pushed me to look for ways to pull more details from the source meshes in the future.

I re-projected the multiple texture sheets down into one and then polished them by unifying the color scheme and paining out seams and baking errors in the normal map.

Feral and Vampire Falmer

For the Dawnguard DLC we were going to focus on the falmer. As they usually had very distinctive clothing and armor I made some naked “feral” variants to use in some dark dungeons we were creating.

For the final boss fight Daryl Brigner and I designed for the Falmer Valley area we needed waves on enemies so I made a frozen vampire version as well by adjusting their coloring and teeth.

Flaming Thrall

Designer Phil Nelson came to me one day with an idea he had mocked up for a flaming thrall. A spell you learned to summon a dog that chases your enemies and explodes. I took the wolf mesh and made a scrolling fire version with a particle fire trail. The beauty of being able to handle the meshwork, rigging, and FX work myself made me a one stop shop for requests like this. If Phil had gone through the normal channels to request his thrall he probably would not have been able to get it because it would theoretically require 3 different peoples time to get done. I was able to hand him something back we shipped with later the same day.

Labyrinthian Spectral Draugr

Another level designer Joel Burgess had a dungeon he was trying to make extra special and he wanted some unique enemies to populate it.Based on what was happening in the dungeon we decided on some ghost draugrs and their spectral hounds. I had no time to slot in his request as we were pushing hard to finish the game so I made it my fun bonus project to work on at the end of my day. Even at 2 in the morning sometimes I would pull them out once I hit my scheduled goals for the day and chip away at their look and spectral weapons.

In the end I delivered him 4 new creatures and 3 new weapons he could use to add a special flavor to his dungeon. My initial shortcut of color remapping the normal maps as the diffuse maps would later come back to haunt me as in the final shipped version of the game normal maps were processed down to a format that could not be remapped and I had to go and fix every asset I had made. The final result was not a nice looking as my first pass but that is the reality of game development.

Naaslaarum and Voslaarum

While riffing on ideas for the Falmer Valley with DLC lead Jeff Browne I had the idea to use a furniture setup to allow dragons to punch in and out of a frozen lake. Using our expertise in ambushes and FX we are fairly confident we could pull it off without any issues. For these unique dragon I wanted to create unique models.

When I initially touched the dragon meshes to optimize them I also played with some ideas to get more dramatic variants from the base meshes without a full remodel. In the end our variants that were in the base game ended up being mainly texture swaps for time considerations. I felt with some creative thinking you could break the repetition and similarity that exists in texture variant models. I used a combination of UV sliding, mesh tweaking, add on meshes, and texture re-baking to try and visually break my dragon from the base game dragons. Character artist Ben Carnow added some texture polish to the final result.

Corrupted Shades

One of my favorite examples of creatively tackling a task that came my way. The task was for necromancer magic effects for the final boss in a dungeon. I went to the designer and got some more information on the dungeon and then pitched this alternate backstory: the necromancer is ripping souls from dead bodies from the civil war and making these enemies and then actually becomes one himself for the fight. I felt this added way more excitement for the player than a human with different magic at the end and I could do it in the same amount of time.

I kit-bashed together a few variants of skeleton and soldier armor and painted them all black in the low poly meshes using vertex color. I created black smoke fx and red glows to cement the look. I did the same for the necromancer but skinned it to the dragon priest rig.

In order to sell the idea the dungeon was filled with desecrated corpses of soldiers I build cheap blackened physics corpses and set them up in the editor as containers to allow the player to loot them.

In all of these cases there was one goal in pushing form more and unique creatures in the game: player value. If I can take items we have lying around and give the player a whole new creature that would have otherwise taken too long to create than I feel I have been successful at adding some. I was never really sure weather or not I had achieved it (other than the lack of Kotaku posts about the handful of shitty add on creature in Skyrim) until I was writing this post and discovered actual fan art dedicated to the creatures I had added using these techniques:)

Twin dragons art:

https://amnis406.deviantart.com/art/Twin-Dragons-375467352

Corrupted shade art:

https://edwarddelandreart.deviantart.com/art/Corrupted-Shades-538688974

As a special bonus the work I added has found its way into other Elder Scrolls titles:)

T.V. P.O.C.