Bioshock Infinite Art Dump - Mike Snight
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Hey all,
Finally dusted off the ol' portfolio and thought I'd share. I started off at Irrational Games as an Environment Modeler, then moved to the Level Art team shortly after and was the Lead Level Artist towards the end. My time working on Bioshock Infinite and DLC was full of great memories. It was a true honor to work with all the incredibly talented folks at Irrational games. Check out my site for more images - www.mikesnight.com Hope you enjoy, thanks for looking!
Also check out the portfolios of other artists that worked on the game as well. Best art team ever! Charles Bradbury, Chad LaClair, John Fuhrer, Chad King, Calen Brait, Laura Zimmerman, Paul Presley, Brian McNett, Jorge Lacera, Rob Waters, Kat Berkley, Mauricio Tejerina, Gavin Goulden, Pete Anderson, Hung Nguyen, Jeremy Griffith, Murray Kraft, Steven Alexander, Scott Sinclair, Scott Duquette, Spencer Luebbert and Kyle Williams.
Mike Snight
www.mikesnight.com
@Twitter
Bioshock Infinite
Finally dusted off the ol' portfolio and thought I'd share. I started off at Irrational Games as an Environment Modeler, then moved to the Level Art team shortly after and was the Lead Level Artist towards the end. My time working on Bioshock Infinite and DLC was full of great memories. It was a true honor to work with all the incredibly talented folks at Irrational games. Check out my site for more images - www.mikesnight.com Hope you enjoy, thanks for looking!
Also check out the portfolios of other artists that worked on the game as well. Best art team ever! Charles Bradbury, Chad LaClair, John Fuhrer, Chad King, Calen Brait, Laura Zimmerman, Paul Presley, Brian McNett, Jorge Lacera, Rob Waters, Kat Berkley, Mauricio Tejerina, Gavin Goulden, Pete Anderson, Hung Nguyen, Jeremy Griffith, Murray Kraft, Steven Alexander, Scott Sinclair, Scott Duquette, Spencer Luebbert and Kyle Williams.
Mike Snightwww.mikesnight.com
Bioshock Infinite
Replies
I'm loving consistently great lighting and colors all over.
Awesome job Mike!!!
However, and this is really a comment for anyone and not just specifically for you, Mike, it lacks any real technical breakdown which I think is important for any portfolio. Regardless of experience or talent its always beneficial to show your work whenever possible. I understand that might be taboo/not possible with an employer, but even a brief written explanation can go very far.
The lighting work has always been really strong in Bioshock. Who's responsible for lighting the scenes? Are there dedicated lighters? Mood and drama are top notch. I'm curious if there's heavy direction on that front, a lighting team, or just insanely talented environment artists that also know how to light like crazy?
Beautiful!
The signage in the game also always has me staring.
I can learn soo much from just seeing each individual and their roles in the project. Plus possibly contact them for help if they are available to learn if I am bumping into an issue achieving something I have seen them do.
Huge gratitude and thanks for sharing, and thanks for your role in such an amazing game. One of the few I have truly enjoyed probably since fallout 03.
hope you all found new work or real soon!
was lucky enough to have the opportunity to help out some as well, but don't you think you over used that red cart a bit? haha.
adam: Thanks Adam. If you scroll over the images on my portfolio it tells you what I did on the specific scene. I would have loved to show more of a technical breakdown of the scenes, but only to help the community, not help myself. A lot of times showing process is unnecessary and can bloat your portfolio. I can take this portfolio to an interview and explain my process there.
I'm not a fan of text in a portfolio, the fewer the words the better, in my opinion. I've turned down portfolios before that have lots of text, blogs, obnoxious "about me" sections. It's just annoying and I know I'm not alone out there. Portfolios are where you show your art, Interviews are where you explain about your process and talk about you as an artist.
If we want to get critical, your portfolio has about 75% too much text. First thing I see in your portfolio is about a paragraph of text and no art.
SouthpawSid: You will always be my favorite FNG. Hope everything is going well, congrats on the wedding coming up! Really happy for you and Ash.
whats_true: "PRESLEYYYYYYYYYYYY WHERE'S MY PROP AT?!" (you know you're going to miss me)
Generalvivi: I miss your giggle.
Endfinity Jon: Thanks for the comment! Lighting the levels was done mainly by myself and the other Level Artists. We had the direction early on that overall the lighting needed to be very bright and have a "summer day" feeling. We took this direction and tried to figure out how to still maintain the creepy edge that Bioshock is known for but also remain beautiful and clean. We arrived at having the lighting and shadows be as high contrast as it could while still maintaining visibility for gameplay. This added a bit of gritty-ness back into the scenes, which I feel ended up working fairly well. Our lighting system allowed us to have the control to do this. Steve Anichini (best gfx programmer in the whole wide world) did a fantastic write up on how our rendering system worked. Here's the link: http://solid-angle.blogspot.com/2014/03/bioshock-infinite-lighting.html Spencer (our only technical artist) helped a TON to help us achieve the final result in the game as well by assisting with us with tools and tech support.
One of the things I loved about Irrational was that the art team often had to wear multiple hats. You had a few modelers (Laura Z, Chad K, Mo) that were incredible concept artists as well. They often did both. Same with the Level Art team. We had a mix of people with different backgrounds like design (Chad L) and Environment Modeling (Charles B and me). This helped us to be able to iterate quickly (which we did a lot) and remake things in a different direction very fast.
As far as art direction goes, there was only really minor lighting feedback along the way. Scott Sinclair was an amazing Art Director, who had a ton of say in the style of the game. Like I mentioned before, we iterated so much that it became more of a "create, execute and pitch" pipeline rather then a "normal" pipeline. Which worked well for us, even though it could be stressful. This process was not for the lighthearted, but the art team was a bad ass and always followed through.
LuCh!: Thanks! I agree, and hope some day I will have time to do a reel showing off spaces in real time. A lot of the artists have found work already at great studios!
Jonas Ronnegard: Haha! I loved your hotdog cart.
thx