December 2004 Sputnik Summary

 

Game Character Creation with Mike O'Rourke of Fritz Studio

 

With the next-next generation of consoles visible on the horizon and developers realizing great performance from new graphics cards in PC games, there is a huge need for greater amounts of high quality game art. All game developers today are rethinking their process for game art creation - simply asking artists to work longer hours is not the answer.

 

Guest Speaker Mike O'Rourke will outline his process for creating great-looking characters and assets that function well in a runtime environment and don't break the budgets (polygonal budget, time budget AND $$$ budget).

 

Starting from primitives and finishing with normal mapping, Mike will outline several time saving tips and tricks for asset creation targeted for PC and consoles, as well as answer questions about the games industry in general.

 

Mike O'Rourke is the principle of Fritz Studio in Portland, a contract game development group that focuses on creating 3d character art with an emphasis on functionality.

 

Mike has extensive 3D art creation experience for games, having worked on Enter the Matrix (Shiny) and American McGee's Alice (EA)as well as several titles at Cyclone/3DO. In addition to production credits, Mike also has designed 3D software (Discreet) and training (Oregon3D) experience.