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Review of Art of Games Talk |
6th February 2004 |
by Aphra Kerr
About 80 people turned up to hear Paul McLaughlin, head of art and Rune Vendler, lead 3D Programmer talk about their current work and changing organisational structures in the games development industry.
Paul McLaughlin originally hails from Waterford and having worked with Emerald Software in Waterford for a couple of years in the late 1980s he went to the UK. His position in Lionhead Studios is head of art and his day to day job involves concept development and prototyping as well as development of characters, buildings, environments and other elements for Lionhead games.
Lionhead is currently working on Black and White II, Fable and Dimitri three quite different games with different artistic and technical challenges.
Paul also spoke about how they averaged 30-50 people now on their development teams, they outsource art work to Estonia and the importance of their fan base and bulletin boards as a source of feedback. Current 3D tools include 3D Studio Max, Maya and Character Studio.
Rune, originally from Denmark, went on to detail current R&D projects he is involved in, not all of which may actually be used in current and future games. Adding fur to the creature for Black and White II was quite a feat but an important aspect of the new 'look' of that game. He also talked about their work on lighting and algorithims for aging characters.
The session was followed by a Q&A and afterwards the crowd retired to, where else, Mahaffy's.
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