Terminator Salvation: The Game
Developer/Publisher: GRIN/Halcyon Games 2009
Platforms: Xbox 360/PS3/PC
Role: Lead Character Artist
www.terminatorsalvationthegame.com
Terminator Salvation was the quickest project I've been involved in this far. I was supposed to move into the team at May 2008 but as the facial animation of Bionic Commando was delayed and my assistance was needed there so I was not fully relocated to Terminator Salvation until October.
During the summer I used the little time I could spare from the intense work on Bionic Commando to aid Carl Henriksson who was the Lead Character Artist for Terminator Salvation at the time. I also gave feedback and educated two new character artists at the Stockholm office as well as helped the art directors with critique and feedback of the outsourcing companies we used. During this time I created the render scripts and we built the “Character Evaluation and Approval Pipeline”.
In October GRIN Stockholm took charge of the project from GRIN Gothenburg and since most of the shots were taken from Stockholm I took over the role as Lead Character Artist. From there the character team had four months to create 30 more characters including the main cast as well as make a new facial animation system for in-game use.
When the character artists from Bionic Commando was moved into Terminator Salvation we became 7 character artists in Stockholm, one in Gothenburg and one in Amsterdam. On top of that we had two outsourcing companies attached to the project that were both producing characters. A lot of the producers and management was also still tied up in Bionic Commando so every department had to step up and handle a lot of the management themselves.
With all this in mind it became clear that my role would be centered around organizing the production and implementation of the assets to avoid confusion as well as streamlining the pipeline. I therefore created no art during this project, and focused on management. The little time I had apart from that was put into scripting tools for automating tasks.
I built two very important optimization/automation scripts during this time, first a script to create atlas textures to minimize drawcalls. I also made a script to automatically optimize the LOD's of the characters. For more information about these look at my script documentation.
Together with Joakim Hellstedt we updated the Cutscene rig from Bionic Commando to become an entirely in-game cut-scene rig. By strategic placement and use of the facial bones we cut the amount of bones with 60% and only lost a bit of the amount of expressiveness in the characters faces. We also skinned all the actors with this new rig.
After the final deadline Tor Helmstein was sent to Los Angeles to aid making the machinima-series that were also published with the game on Xbox Live. I was in charge of managing the GRIN side of this and supplying him with whatever assets he needed.
Terminator Salvation was not the best game I've been involved in, but the one that I've learned the most from. I had several obstacles to overcome such a large team, people off location, outsourcing content and very little time until the final deadline. In the end I think the character team performed an outstanding job, and I'm proud of that achievement regardless of the mediocre reviews the game as a whole has received.
Platforms: Xbox 360/PS3/PC
Role: Lead Character Artist
www.terminatorsalvationthegame.com
Terminator Salvation was the quickest project I've been involved in this far. I was supposed to move into the team at May 2008 but as the facial animation of Bionic Commando was delayed and my assistance was needed there so I was not fully relocated to Terminator Salvation until October.
During the summer I used the little time I could spare from the intense work on Bionic Commando to aid Carl Henriksson who was the Lead Character Artist for Terminator Salvation at the time. I also gave feedback and educated two new character artists at the Stockholm office as well as helped the art directors with critique and feedback of the outsourcing companies we used. During this time I created the render scripts and we built the “Character Evaluation and Approval Pipeline”.
In October GRIN Stockholm took charge of the project from GRIN Gothenburg and since most of the shots were taken from Stockholm I took over the role as Lead Character Artist. From there the character team had four months to create 30 more characters including the main cast as well as make a new facial animation system for in-game use.
When the character artists from Bionic Commando was moved into Terminator Salvation we became 7 character artists in Stockholm, one in Gothenburg and one in Amsterdam. On top of that we had two outsourcing companies attached to the project that were both producing characters. A lot of the producers and management was also still tied up in Bionic Commando so every department had to step up and handle a lot of the management themselves.
With all this in mind it became clear that my role would be centered around organizing the production and implementation of the assets to avoid confusion as well as streamlining the pipeline. I therefore created no art during this project, and focused on management. The little time I had apart from that was put into scripting tools for automating tasks.
I built two very important optimization/automation scripts during this time, first a script to create atlas textures to minimize drawcalls. I also made a script to automatically optimize the LOD's of the characters. For more information about these look at my script documentation.
Together with Joakim Hellstedt we updated the Cutscene rig from Bionic Commando to become an entirely in-game cut-scene rig. By strategic placement and use of the facial bones we cut the amount of bones with 60% and only lost a bit of the amount of expressiveness in the characters faces. We also skinned all the actors with this new rig.
After the final deadline Tor Helmstein was sent to Los Angeles to aid making the machinima-series that were also published with the game on Xbox Live. I was in charge of managing the GRIN side of this and supplying him with whatever assets he needed.
Terminator Salvation was not the best game I've been involved in, but the one that I've learned the most from. I had several obstacles to overcome such a large team, people off location, outsourcing content and very little time until the final deadline. In the end I think the character team performed an outstanding job, and I'm proud of that achievement regardless of the mediocre reviews the game as a whole has received.