For the past year I have been busy with my first job in the games industry at Goodgame Studios in Hamburg, Germany. This was an extremely exciting role for me because it was a job where I felt I could use all my knowledge of games development to do the thing that I really loved which is build new characters and get them ready to be put into a game engine. Whilst I consider myself a bit of a generalist and have done many projects before where I design my own characters this was a chance to focus all my effort on some professional art assets given to me by character artists.
The game is called Heroes Realm for Android and iOS which is a free to play hero collection game featuring a number of interesting character types spread over a variety of different battlefields. Your objective is to maintain and upgrade your heroes, improve they're stats and use special powers to defeat hordes of mobs and minions that stand in your path.
As well as developing the vast majority of the characters rigs using the CAT system in 3dsmax, I was also responsible for developing renders of each of the characters to be used in cut scenes as well as the hero icons. I had a large role in the implementation of characters into the game engine and needed to solve technical and organisation issues to streamline the pipeline and set each of the characters up in game.
My demoreel features a range of some of the characters I rigged using a standard range of motions animation to test out the deformation of the limbs and setup some of the more unique weapons and clothes. Whilst I learned a great deal during this job and grew very confident at producing rigs in different styles for many expressionate characters I still felt that I was limited only to 3dsmax. Whilst the pipeline focused on 3dsmax and I could use all the knowledge I'd gathered previously I still felt that I needed to improve my skill set and learn Maya so that I can apply for professional jobs using both pieces of software. This will be my task over the next year as I pad out my showreel and continue Slight Turbulence to increase my employability.