Discussion in 'UHall'
started by TheGrimmOmen, Jul 6, 2012.

I've gotten quite a few questions about this so I thought I'd just go ahead and let you know that my time as a UO dev is coming to an end. By the middle of this month, I will no longer be art lead for UO, and by Sept 27th, I will no longer be a part of the UO team. Mythic is moving my position to Virginia.

I wanted to let you all know that I feel very honored to have been a member of the UO development team serving, over the years, as an Environment Artist, Character Artist, Character Lead, Associate Art Director, Technical Artist, and finally, Lead CG Supervisor. More than that, I've been very fortunate to have been a part of this community.

I'll never forget the first day I told the team that I was going to start posting to the community. It was right around the time that we had shipped Samurai Empire, and I had been promoted to Character Lead. Literally everyone was telling me that I really needed to be prepared because there was a LOT of hostility towards the artists. I told them that maybe it was because none of the artists talked to them! LOL. Now, not a day goes by that I don't check in to see what's getting posted and to take part in this wonderful community.

I remember the first animated tile I ever made, and a lot of you still have those green soulstones in your houses.

I remember unleashing thunder chickens at Luna Bank on the test shards and laughing along with you guys as the corpses piled higher, and the battle raged for an hour!

I thoroughly enjoyed getting to sit and talk with so many of you at our player meet ups, and I fondly remember sitting at a table with a couple talking about UO - who, until the end of the conversation, didn't know I was a dev.

I remember working with dev legends such as Tact, Oaks, Hans, Karma, Sunsword, Wilki, Binki, and Troublemaker as well as us new bloods, Cathat, Grumpy, and others who never picked up a moniker. I still think of them as some of the finest devs I've ever worked with.

As a game developer, it's a rare opportunity to work on such an iconic project and with such a dedicated player community, and it is an opportunity that I am very grateful for.

I've spent close to a decade working on this game and building friendships, and I hope that those friendships and this wonderful game last for years to come.

Thank you all for years of great memories.

-Grimm

TheGrimmOmen, Jul 6, 2012

Q: What is your official job title? What does it cover/involve?
A: My official title is Lead CG Supervisor. Generally, a Lead CG Sup is in charge of tools (evaluation, creation, implementation, and support) and pipeline (the processes that artists follow to create art and get that artwork into the game) development. Since I’ve been doing UO art for… a long time now, my responsibilities currently also include Art Lead/Director responsibilities, which include schedule development for the art team, as well as writing up reviews and feedback for artwork being developed for UO. I also get to do concept artwork and on a good day, animation for our creatures. I’m also responsible for processing all the artwork we create to get it in the game.

Q: What other games do you play? What hobbies do you have?
A: I’m a big first person shooter player. I liked Black Ops, but LOVE Battlefield 3. I played Counter Strike for YEARS. Love innovative games like Osmosis, the Portal Games, and a game on the Ipad that has to do with sound waves that I can’t think of the name right now. Oddly enough, I don’t take to MMO’s very well. Ultima is the only one that I’ve played for more than 2 months, and I’ve tried A LOT. Since the question will inevitably come up, yes I play UO, but not regularly. I play on Lake Superior, although I don’t play under Grimm Omen. Actually, I just got through clearing my house and starting re-designing it from scratch.

As for Hobbies, I really enjoy carpentry, gardening, fishing (warm water and salmon), sculpting, masonry, teaching (local community college), coding (C# in Unity, Actionscripting in Flash, and sometimes just odd stuff in C#). I also play the Great highland bagpipes and compete almost monthly.

Q: What is your all time favorite gaming console? Why?
A: You know, I think I still have a special place in my heart for the Dreamcast. I bloody loved that console! It had terrific graphics capabilities, and it produced a beautiful picture on the TV. I think it really got short changed and never got to live up to its potential.

Q: Kilt preferences... traditional or tactical ballistic?
A: I can’t really take a high road on this topic. There’s a school of thought amongst the kilt wearers that anything outside of your traditional kilt is some kind of abomination. But I think there are some who can look good in a Utilikilt or tactical kilt, but for me, if I’m going to drop $200 + on a kilt, it’s going to be a traditional kilt. Right now, it just doesn’t make economical sense to spend that kind of money on an “every day kilt” when I can get a nice pair of jeans for a fraction of the cost. Also, it’s nice to get complimented on a full kilt since people are more used to seeing the Utilikilt styles.

Q: Have you tried haggis and what did you think?
A: I’ve had American haggis (made mostly of beef), and thought it was pretty good. As far as I know, traditional Scottish haggis is still banned in the U.S. because it contains sheep lungs. So I can’t say I’ve had traditional Scottish Haggis, but I’d love to try it some day!

Q: From start to finish, what is a typical day like in the shoes of GrimmOmen?
A: Get up, grab a shower.. oh wait – too far in the morning?? Ok. Well, the first thing I usually do in the mornings is go through and review art dailies, this is where I review our artist work and prep feedback information for them. We (the UO team) have a daily team meeting where we discuss what we’re going to be working on for that day. Usually I check in our bug database to see if there’s anything new. After that it’s pretty much the soup de jour. I get started on whatever items are on the critical list for that day. These things might be getting some reference material and concept art together for upcoming tasks, might be sending emails like “What’s the status on this asset??”

Good days are when I’m on the creative side of the job, making concept artwork or animations, or working on various aspects of our art pipeline. The tough days are “processing” days when artwork gets completed and needs to be setup technically to be processed by our pipeline… and rendering… days when there is a lot of rendering can make the day just drag by, it’s can literally be work 5 minutes, render for 20, build and check assets in the game, rinse and repeat. Animations and multi tile objects are the worst in this respect. Oh yea, days in which I get creature animations delivered in is like Christmas morning… every time.

Since I keep East Coast time here on the west coast, I usually have to take a little break in the morning to grab some breakfast around 9am, let my dogs outside to do their business, then I’ll grab another 30 or so for lunch when my schedule permits.

Q: What is your proudest moment as an artist for UO? In general?
A: In UO… I’d have to say that that UOKR (I was the character lead) is one of my proudest moments. Despite some of things we could have done better, completing around 500 characters and the THOUSANDS of animations, in addition to rendering out enough final frames to complete around 12 1 hour animated TV episodes (30 x 60 x 60 x 12 = you do the math!) in the time we had to do in and with the number of people. And that’s not even taking into consideration how much iteration of characters and # of times we re-rendered the animations! It was a MASSIVE undertaking, and we had a top notch team. I miss ‘em a lot.

In recent times though, I really enjoyed how much the players had fun with the Halloween jack-o-lanterns last year – it was very rewarding to see players having fun playing an Idea I had. It’s a rarity since I don’t venture into designer territory too often.

There is one thing coming up that I’m really excited and at the same time nervous about. But I think it’s going to be be awesome.

Q: Have you worked on other games as an artist? If so, which ones?
A: Ohh yea. Most of my game art history has little in the way of artistic awesomeness, but I’ve worked on a lot of the army men games for the Playstation and N64 consoles. While they weren’t visually stunning, I learned a lot about how engines handle graphics – which has served me well in my career. I also was an artist on one of the Heroes of Might and Magic titles, and was an artist on what would have been an awesome game called 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I was also an artist/ tech artist for a project for the U.S. Army – then I came over to EA have been an artist in various capacities on UO since.

Q: If there was one thing you would change about UO what would it be?
A: I’d make UO a hybrid 2D/3D game, possibly using the Unity client and get UO to be a cross-platform game. That’s assuming I didn’t have to worry about all the resource and technical hurdles required to pull that off!

Q: How does a concept sketch get turned into production art in game?
A: It’s pretty straight forward, actually. The artist gets the piece of concept art, and depending on the complexity, bring it into a 3D client and models the asset. Using Photoshop, they create the textures that get applied to the 3D model. All along the way there are lots of daily reviews of the art assets progress. Once that’s done, it gets handed off to me to make sure naming conventions are correct, and to get added into our asset resource manager, and then I use our custom tool set to render out the final art pieces that go into the game.

Q: What programs are used to create artwork and items that eventually get added into game?
A: I used a host of tools. I use 3D Studio Max for all the 3D work, Photoshop for some of the 2D stuff, and DeBabelizer Pro for a lot of the 2D batch processing. We also have a suite of custom tools I wrote to handle things like art processing, compositing, and XML code creation.

Q: Do you have any advice for folks who want to be a video game artist?
A: Yea! Make sure you learn traditional art and design before you go anywhere near a computer. The difference between someone who only took “game artist” focused art classes and someone who actually took the traditional art path background is huge. Learn art history and color theory. All that stuff. And when you’re done, hit your local Barns and Noble or neighborhood bookstore and look for reference material. I have easily over a 100 of books covering topics like anatomy – human and animal, architectural books, airplanes, tanks, etc. Reference material will make or break your artwork.

Q: When playing a computer game, what is the most important to you: graphics, gameplay or story? Why?
A: Gameplay, hands down. Gameplay is what the art of game design is all about. If you don’t have that, then glossy artwork isn’t going to make your game better. If the game design is solid and fun to play then the art quality doesn’t really matter that much – as long as it doesn’t detract from playing the game. You know you’re doing something right when art doesn’t matter.

Q: From Woody : If you could add anything you wanted into Ultima Online what would it be?
A: Werewolves – tied to the lunar cycles, I wrote up a whole thing on it. What we have right now is more of a costume. As a true werewolf you’d have to deal with the animal side of your nature taking over. You see some benefits, but those would be balanced with the curse side of things. It could also be a cool opportunity to loop in the Forensic Evaluation, Item and taste ID, cooking, etc. into the lore so that players could RP werewolf hunters as well. I’d also like to see UO transformed back into a more dynamic and living world – with some safeguards to accommodate for the “killer” player types out there. Oh yea, and if you attack a bear in UO, it would hand you your butt on a silver platter.

Q: From Hinreissend : What is the main focus from an art point of view this year: new art or improving on current art?
A: Both. This might sound like fence riding, and it is! But at any given time I’m working on both improvements and new artwork. They’re both priorities, but as for what gets on my list of “must get done” for each publish, that’s up to Jeff and Bonnie, and those priorities can change from week to week.

Q: From Tancred RedStar : How long (hours) does it take a create the artwork for a single new piece of clothing for the 2D client? 3D client?
A: The 2D and 3D clients, for the most part follow down the same pipeline and diverge at various points due to requirements of each of the clients. But generally speaking, each asset can take about a month to complete. Creatures can easily take 2 to 3 months.

I wanted to send a semi-farewell to you. My role as character lead is changing into a new position on the UO team. While it’s not entirely out of the UO Art Department, my new position of technical artist on UO entails a lot more work in art tools development than it does in the actual creation of creatures and wearables. Over the course of development for UOKR, a lot of tools had been developed for art creation and as tools in general go, they need maintenance and development. My technical background makes me an excellent candidate (if I do say so myself ;-)) and it’s a role I’m very excited to take on. My current duties will be absorbed by our Art Director (who you can thank for the new female paper doll character art), and we will continue to have the fantastic help of our Lead Animator who not only has well over 10 years of animation experience, but has also GM’ed several characters in UO.

So to keep this short and sweet (Ok, maybe just sweet), it’s been great being an art lead on UO, UOKR, Stygian Abyss, and all the anniversaries and publishes in-between. It’s not often in game development that you get the opportunity to work on something that you can feel proud of. Not just in the work that you’ve done but what the final product stands for. For me, working on UO has been and will continue to be wonderful not just because we have top notch developers who care about UO, but also because you, the Stewards of UO who have supported us not just in compliments, but also in criticisms both constructive and scathing. All serve to benefit UO, so keep them coming as we continue on with KR, your participation in the development of UO is and had been essential to keeping UO great.

Sincerely,

JP “Grimm” Harrod

TheGrimmOmen
UO Lead Artist
Dinner to Kaiser: Or, Changing Roles.
07/24/07 04:00 PM

I hope to be able to answer questions regarding Art and UO. While I’ll try to answer as many questions as I can, there will be some that I can’t answer due to a lack of time or other factors, so I appreciate your understanding. That being said, I look forward to hearing from each of you.

Best wishes,
Grimm

TheGrimmOmen
UO Lead Artist
08/10/05 04:18 PM