PAU FIOL - LEAD ARTIST
As a Lead Artist I had to coordinate a team of seven people, both internally and with the design and programming departments. Another important task was to define, oversee, and help ensure the style and assets of the game stayed consistent and feasible. Since the game was developed with a custom engine that was largely developed in parallel with the game, each additional art feature needed to be discussed with programmers and adjusted in scope. Because of the size of the artist department, my role was not exclusively focused on lead tasks, as we could not afford to not have an extra artist working on the project. During the development of the Mandalorian: Sands of Arvala I had to partially step down from the lead role due to personal issues, which was thankfully taken over by Enric Durán, and instead focused on producing and iterating art.
The role of Lead Artist was challenging from the start, as it was the first project of this scale any of us had done to date. Managing deadlines and tasks, communication, and the personal level was not easy, more so given how all work was remote due to COVID-19. However, the experience that taking this role has given me has greatly improved my understanding on how actual game development is.
PROJECT CONTRIBUTION
Concept Art
During the early stages of the project I did conceptual art using Photoshop and Procreate for environments and espcially for a few characters, to make sure modellers had all the necessary references to model lower poly assets
Modelling
I did modelling in 3DSMax for some environment props and the turret droid enemy, and I iterated, and did UV for many other props, such as a few of the weapons.
Texturing
The section I spent the most time during production was doing and iterating textures. We chose to use Substance Painter, which I learnt from scratch for the project, but was a very rewarding software to learn, as it really did help doing better textures faster. I also was in charge to ensure props stayed within the color palette that was set
Particles
During the final sprints of the project I redid many of the particles in the game. Due to the lack of time and engine constraints, the Particle sytem was limited, which led to an interesting excercise of creating simple but visually interesting particles.
Website
I styled the project's website and helped develop a significant part of it, along with Santiago Moliner.
