Tileset development

The SOE_Project requires us to have dozens of urban locations. The Unreal engine has some specific limitations that we had to work around, especially in outdoor environments. The tileset editor was key in our ability to make so many maps and maintain realistic draw distances.

Windows and architectural trim

One of the broad problems that I was tasked with solving for The SOE_Project was the high polycount of our exterior buildings. The vertex count of any given street within our game was prohibitive. I devised a way to draw all facade details from a centralized library of structural elements that shared a custom texture that allows the geometry to be fully smoothed, which reduced our total vertex count by over 60%.

Trees and Foliage

Both Forza 2 and The SOE_Project required a large and efficient tree library. I worked from the ground up to architect a solution that made the best looking assets possible within the limitations of our respective runtime engines.

Lightmap unwrap efficiency

I met with our engineers to help determine where our art was inefficient and found that our lightmaps are taking up much of our texture budget. A common problem that I have encountered is sloppy unwrapping practices, especially in the auxiliary lightmap channel where poor decisions, unintended distortion, or inefficiency is not visually obvious. This is very costly. I have since undertaken the task of reunwrapping all of our lightmap channels for the purpose of reducing lightmap size without losing visual quality.

MEL scripting and tools development

With a background in engineering in college, I have recently added MEL scripting to my repertoire in order to aid our artists in some of our more repetitive tasks, and help develop tools that our over-taxed technical artists cannot immediately address.

Outsourcing guidance

One of the reasons that outsourcing results can often be disappointing is because of an unrealistic depth of tasks being outsourced, or poor communication between the company and the outsourcer. I have made outsourcing documentation that will produce more predictable results, featuring both high-level bulleted lists of what is important to us, as well as "good/bad" image sequences that act as a catch-all in cases of poor translations at overseas outsourcing companies.

Communication

Good communication between departments and leads is very important, especially on a team as large as the SOE_Project's. There were some communication breakdowns that illustrated a lot of unknown dependencies.