[Portfolio] Calen Brait - Lead Modeler Bioshock Infinite
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Hey Guys,
Like a few others on here from Irrational Games, I wanted to show some of the art I did while on Bioshock Infinite for the last 5 years. I was the Lead Modeler, which I managed 5 internal artists, outsourcing companies and day to day making art. Similar to other smaller companies, I had to wear a variety of hats to help, proudly get Infinite to the finish line! Almost all of the architecture you will see, I setup in 'Procedural Rulesets' in our version of UE3. I believe we were the first game to ship with this as a game wide architectural system (someone jump in, if this isn't so). You will see it's basically like a BSP volume that you can select a face and drag out the building to get the desired results of - more windows or less windows. This was a big performance savior that allowed us to save with instancing meshes, especially since our Xbox360/PS3 asset restrictions were tight.
Also, to give credit to other talented artists at Irrational, some of the beginning screen shots have smaller props and characters. I did not create these. The top textured assets had concept art, which help keep our style cohesive. All else I created!
Thanks for looking!
- Calen
cbrait@gmail.com
https://twitter.com/CalenBrait
Like a few others on here from Irrational Games, I wanted to show some of the art I did while on Bioshock Infinite for the last 5 years. I was the Lead Modeler, which I managed 5 internal artists, outsourcing companies and day to day making art. Similar to other smaller companies, I had to wear a variety of hats to help, proudly get Infinite to the finish line! Almost all of the architecture you will see, I setup in 'Procedural Rulesets' in our version of UE3. I believe we were the first game to ship with this as a game wide architectural system (someone jump in, if this isn't so). You will see it's basically like a BSP volume that you can select a face and drag out the building to get the desired results of - more windows or less windows. This was a big performance savior that allowed us to save with instancing meshes, especially since our Xbox360/PS3 asset restrictions were tight.
Also, to give credit to other talented artists at Irrational, some of the beginning screen shots have smaller props and characters. I did not create these. The top textured assets had concept art, which help keep our style cohesive. All else I created!
Thanks for looking!
- Calen
cbrait@gmail.com
https://twitter.com/CalenBrait
Replies
Good luck with the job search!
Good luck with your job search.
That procedural volume must have knocked a lot of time of level building.
Good luck with the job hunt!
To answer some questions about the Procedural Buildings. This is an integrated feature in stock UE3, we did have to do some tailoring on our version of the engine to get better results to work with our Beast lighting model. However, there is no reason, any of you guys can't read over the documents and jump in! That's what I enjoy about Unreal, is its artist friendly familiarity.
An important part to making this type of building system work, is having modular assets. From what I have seen, this is generally how Unreal games tend to develop levels, so this seemed like a natural progression for our scope of game. I like to think of these procedural building volumes as a base foundation for building out a space. Once Level Builders are happy with dimensions, they can offset the architecture with signage, props, foliage, etc. You can even go as far as add unique assets into the ruleset, that when a Level Builder drags out the volume, every so many units it will interject this unique sign/etc.
Qdwach - you're exactly right that this sped up iteration time for the Level Builders. That's why I personally am a fan of the flexibility of this system. If you need an extra floor, drag that volume up!
The general idea is:
Setting up rulesets will look like this - a node based system that you can control the sizes, spacing, color variation, etc.
Here is a helpful link to UDN for how to setup these rulesets. I actually referenced these pages a lot when getting started out or when I ran into issues of why the buildings weren't looking right.
https://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ProceduralBuildings.html
edwardsomatic - We opted for a tileable atlas texture to allow more variation. Also I had to be mindful of constraining meshes to one material (if possible). This all goes back to our tighter performance restrictions with the scope of levels we had.
A quick question regarding the Finkton model. How much of it would be modular? Would each individual window be modular to be placed elsewhere or was the whole structure treated as an asset (which would obviously be tilable by the looks of it)
Thanks for posting!
Gughhh, yeah we ran into this problem as well with unreal. nice hp work.
Good job man!
I'll buy this game only because of the art direction, I like it so much. Even now, after work I like to google some screenshots, look at these floating buildings and re-draw it
This climate reminds me:
Sugus - Ya, the Finkton model was treated more as a one-off asset. Also, like you pointed out can be duplicated horizontally/vertically. These were mainly used in the Finkton Hub to wall off the exterior player bounds. For an asset like this, I try to be aware of general units throughout the asset, so if a Level Builder needs a piece separated for another use, its easy to pop off and make a new asset. Often times these are were the cool happy accidents come about!
Here's a wall/pillar set with a planter box at the base. This object allowed us to easily tile vertically if wanted to increase scale in an area.
Fantastic, thank you for the explanation!