#mark teare

Nuka World

Key art for Fallout 4

Nuka World DLC

Skyrim: Skills Menu

The skills menu work began early on in the process of developing Skyrim and was changed and improved throughout the duration.

The very first step was to take Todd's notes and put a visual stake in the ground we could build from.

I blocked in a very rough version in 3DS Max and animated the camera so we could begin the discussion about how this menu could work

There was always the idea of skills and perk trees as constellations (based on 3 from Oblivion) but it took on many different forms as we progressed.

At on point I was toying with the idea of the stars being distributed in the depth in space and only forming the constellation in the back out view but navigation felt to uncontrolled in that reality.

Early on I also tried to use Fume FX to create the nebulae using a sim with some decent results but the speed at witch I could create like this was limited due to the simulation time.

My first pass at pass at painting the oblivion constellations as nebula worked out pretty well so I decided to take that route. In some way I like these version better but I have to visually reinforce the colors associated with the different skill groups in the final painting.

Once I dropped my nebula paintings into the scene the final look of the menu started to come together.

At this point I was also iterating on the stars and lines and their animations so we could build the perk availability and unlocking UI mechanisms.

Once we has all of that I took some time to finalize the nebula painting and break them into layers to create parallax. The entire menu was one 3d file that contained the background, animating perk tree art, and nodes to attach the code built perk trees. As long as each piece was scaled from the center of the scene you would always see the layers line up correctly when you moved back to the origin in the menu.

As a nod to the heavenly nature of Sovengarde and the skills menu Noah Berry the environment lead and the artist making the Sovengarde skybox took my paintind and incorporated it subtly into the sky.

Nuka world Key art - initial background

Key art for Fallout 4

Nuka World DLC

Nuka World Key art - sourced elements

Key art for Fallout 4

Nuka World DLC

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:)