I recently finished this all Z-Brush piece. In celebration of the remastered Spyro, to have some fun and learn new skills. For years and years  I would always choose my art projects based on what  I thought would make my showreel better, luckily I can now just choose projects that are 100% just for my enjoyment.

Game Design Vol. 1 - The Plumber and The Hedgehog

If you look at the visuals from 1998’s Tomb Raider III to 20  years later the difference in visuals is phenomenal, but if you look at a Mario game from 10 years ago the difference in visual fidelity is actually fairly small. So while Sony and Microsoft are pushing consumers towards all the pixels your eyes can handle, how are Nintendo and Mario still selling well?

After completing Sonic Mania recently and revisiting Super Mario 3D Land on the 3DS, I decided to dive in to what makes Mario platforming so good....

CLICK BELOW FOR THE MAIN ARTICLE:
http://andrewlawson3d.blogspot.co.uk/p/if-you-look-at-visuals-from-1998s-tomb.html

Star Wars Battlefront 2

I have been working as a Game Designer on SWBF 2 for the last year, working with Criterion games creating Starfighter Assault.  Here are some highlights of a couple of the levels I was lead Designer for.

So what does a game designer do? Well, first as a team we decide on a location for the level and then draw up some ideas of what could happen. I then take these ideas and more of my own and experiment in a white box type level different scenarios and try to find what would be the most fun. I will  build simple geometry in Maya and then in this case testing in our Unity prototype environment. Weeks or months of iteration will happen until myself and the team are feeling good about what we have. Here are some examples of what the levels 'Ryloth' and 'The Unknown Regions' looked like 6/9 months before we shipped the game.

Once we have confidence in the direction of the white box level we move to our production Engine Frostbite. After many months of iterations the final product is in the video below.

GamesCom 2017

It was a real treat to be presenting Star Fighter Assault for Star Wars Battlefront 2 at GamesCom this year, the fans were awesome, thanks to the 12,000+ people that queued for hours to play our game, especially you cosplay guys and girls! 

Horizon The Beautiful

Volume 2 of In Game photography. The beautiful world of Horizon Zero Dawn was my subject this time.

E3 is one of my  favourite weeks of the year. It's like Christmas, but for gamer's. Here are my highlights from the 2017 show!

Sonic Mania - Recreating and remixing the game that made me fall in love with video games, I never expected this game to be made, so it's a bit of a dream come true.

Forza 7 - I think the Forza brand delivers the best racing experience in modern racing games, both visuals and AI are top of the class, offering hard core racing with the main game, and an outstanding more casual arcade experience with Horizion. I started seriously getting into racing games with Gran Turismo so it will be interesting to see if they can keep up with Forza later this year.

The Evil WIthin 2 - I felt the first captured the classic Silient Hill/Resident Evil survival horror feel perfectly, so I'm all in for number 2.

Uncharted: Lost Legacy - Naughty Dog redefining gaming again, oh no big deal just a 10 hour single player story DLC! Exited meter is a 10 for this one!

Life Is Strange - Before The Storm - Even though this is more of an interactive experience than a game, I really loved what they did with the main game, the art style, the character development, and some of those choices you had to make really messed with my head.

Star Wars Battlefront 2 Trailer

Pleased to be able to reveal that I have been working on Star Wars Battlefront 2 with EA Dice and Criterion, for the last year.

The Jungle Book

Congrats to The Jungle Book for winning the Oscar for 'Best Visual Effects' last month (and doing the double of the Bafta and Oscar!). I worked as a Texture Artist with MPC on this project. This involved being assigned a plant from the jungle sourcing high quality reference from the internet... yes the internet, no high quality photo shoot library's for this one :(  and then the next stage is painting a photo-real texture on to a grey 3D model of the plant. We would then do 360 renders with our sourced reference images overlaid on top for comparison, and these would be analysed on a large projector screen, by VFX supervisors and leads. Having left early in the project I didn't see much finished work, so I was pleased to see the final result looked so good. If you have not seen it, it is also a really good movie as well as world class visual effects.

In Game Photography - Uncharted

Comparing a game to art is not something that is widely accepted by the mainstream, sure you have a lot of 'concept art' of a game, but I'm talking about looking at a still frame of a game and being happy to frame that image and hang it on your wall. Uncharted 4 delivers this like few others. I loved Uncharted 4 and consider it the most beautiful and artistically inspiring AAA game ever made.  I used the Camera tool during my play through to capture and share some moments that stood out to me. From a technical art perspective some little things really stood out to me as amazing when playing this, like Drake dynamically pushing hanging vines out his way as he walks past, or swarms of flies, that you only really notice at the right angle, really anchor you in the world.  My capture's are mainly environment shots but the character animation and transitions between cut scenes and game play are also best in class in my opinion, heck they even managed a kiss between Drake and Elena to look pretty believable and emotional, probably the first time I have said that about a video game!

MPC behind the curtain VFX film work 2014

Stepping back in time a bit...