I’m a Character Artist on the team. That involves modelling, sculpting, texturing minor characters and major enemies. Sometimes some minor mechanical works, but mostly it relates to characters. Enemies, Warframes, accessory pieces that relate to characters; our small team here covers the majority of that work.

I’ve been in the video game industry since 2007. I graduated college around that time but I didn’t start doing characters exclusively until probably a year and a half after that. I’ve always kinda specialized on character art but work sometimes requires you to have skills in other areas as well. I’ve also done a bit of environment and lighting.

Yeah, that was what my original portfolio out of college was all about. It was very character driven. It’s not necessarily what I started doing when I first started working, but eventually I fell into my specialization pretty soon after.

Oh geez, I think the ones that come to mind are Alad V’s head and face, some of the alternate Warframe helmets...it’s really hard to recall it all now. The truth is sometimes the work doesn’t involve getting a character done from start to finish. A lot of us will just do textures on a character, or when a character is complete a group of us will work on accessories or refinements.

I think the last major one I worked on was Alad V. Because of the cinematic and the PS4 announcement at the time, he was a pretty big deal. I specialized on the face and the head but it was such a huge project.

I also worked on Vay Hek, the multistage boss character. Some of the Grineer helmets, Rhino Prime, I helped a bit on Loki Prime, I’ve done most of the work on Nekros. A little bit of everything, but it can be hard to remember. We get the task, work on the task, and then it gets shipped out.

Especially for the more complex ones. There’s just too much work, particularly for boss characters. A boss with multiple stages means it needs to have multiple states, which means it needs way more geometry, complex rigging and animations. It involves multiple people coming together.

Thankfully we share and rotate certain tasks. If I worked on a body of a character one time, then next time I’m given the opportunity to work on the face. We try to rotate around, but that’s always at the discretion of Dennis or Mynki.

Yup! I was briefly detained for another quick task, but I’m back onto Tyl full time now.

Now this one I’m working on the entire thing. His body, multiple accessories, pretty much everything except for his sword or axe has all been given to me. It’s taken me a bit of time to refine and get really deep into the rapid production phase.

Translating it between the concept to figuring out the shapes and early blockouts. For the purposes of animation trying to interpret his design from a gameplay perspective. He’s got this multiple modular forearm system, but he also keeps all these modules on his body. Just trying to find a creative way to incorporate all that on the character.

Concepts can only go so far, and sometimes it’s nice when the concepts are not very clear. When the concepts are very detailed it doesn’t give us much room to improvise or come up with any solutions, but when a concept is vague it lets us really explore how this stuff gets assembled with respect to rigging animations.

I will say I am well past the high definition modeling of the character, so next up is the game-ready modeling! It’s probably the least creative part, just putting that extra polish on textures and resolution levels.

Yeah. In general, him being a self-contained character with respect to his different attachments, he’s got a bit of pipework and intricate details. One of the two major challenges were designing the mechanical bits on him. How they fit, what they looked like and where they all worked on the unit.

Nailing down the exaggerated shape and volume that Mynki wanted was also tough. My early examples just didn’t go far enough, and there was a lot of encouragement in making his musculature and upper body heavier. There’s a big contrast between his upper body and his more delicate feet...or carbon fiber blades. Whatever the sci-fi explanation is! -laughs-

I would say Alad V, he was probably the most fun because the task involved creating high resolution face. Specifically for the purpose of cinematic shots and animation close-ups for the Playstation 4 announcement teaser. There was a point where I wasn’t able to work on a lot of faces. The truth is we don’t have a lot of characters that require any facial sculpting, only by nature of the Warframes themselves. Having an opportunity to work on these key gameplay (and plot) driven characters is pretty fun. I think overall he turned out great. That entire cutscene took all of us a lot of time and it came out really, really good.

It was probably the single most complete cinematic I’ve worked on.

I also worked on Captain Vor, who was another fun character. That one was the reverse though, I worked on his entire body and another teammate worked on all of the facial sculpts and animation. The biggest characters are always the most fun to work with. We have the most time, we’ve got the most freedom, and it allows us to flex our creative muscles and show our abilities. The bigger the better.

It can be as quickly as maybe two or three weeks and as long as a couple months. Tyl has been in development for quite a while now, but sometimes a lot of it is not the complicated sculpting but rather figuring out the mechanics. Trying to get the exact look and feel that the director wants.

We also have to take into consideration revisions that happen as well. That can happen a lot. A sculpt can change from what was originally envisioned to what’s happening in design. A lot of what we do is happening in parallel with our design and animation team. Sometimes things creep up in animation where they need to take a different turn, and that will trickle down to us.

-laughs- That’s right, yeah.

I don’t think he’s doing too well since I’ve since had my hardware replaced. That was a pretty funny incident with him being stuck inside my tablet...It threw me for a loop. I thought I was going crazy because I kept seeing this tiny pixel moving across the screen. But that only lasted for a few days thankfully.

I think the biggest pitfall I see in junior portfolios is when people jump into software a little too quickly. The abundance of software gives you a false sense of ability rather than taking a step back and focusing on fundamentals. Study traditional sculpture and anatomy sculpture. Even with respect to Warframe, we do take liberties in the anatomy of our characters but whether the features are exaggerated or traditional the fundamentals stay the same.

I also wouldn’t overcomplicate things as far as portfolio pieces are concerned. Subtlety is more important than detail. People get a misguided understanding of what detail is, and your portfolios is only as strong as your weakest piece. If you have something that feels weak compositionally I wouldn’t put it in. The concept of having a minimum of ten pieces isn’t really true. If you can impress someone with one or two pieces that’ll go a long way.

At this stage you need to be as good as or better than people already working in the industry. Going online to look at the portfolios of people already in the industry will give you a good idea of what you’re up against, and how high you should set the bar for yourself.