Nadine Gutiérrez Pociño

Chicos, a esto le va a hacer falta un rework. Pero está bien eh

Project overview

Hello! I'm Nadine, Lead Artist of Magical Muffin.

In this project I've had the opportunity to lead nine artists. I was focused on manage every art member so that we can finally have final art for the game. At the beginning, I helped some art teammates to understand all the pipeline process (2D & 3D). As a member of the department, I also did some art when I had everyone well organized.

The goal of the art team was to recreate a The Witcher cartoonish style so that the game looked funny. We mainly opted for an exaggerated proportions to get that goal.

Lead Role

My main functions since I was a Lead were the following ones:

Check the milestone goals and create the necessary tasks to complete that sprint. Organize the members by their best art skills and propose them to do specific tasks, although anytime I was opened up to hear them if they wanted to do any other task they would prefered. In this case I checked the task planning again and changed the missing tasks on the other teammates. Once everyone knew their work to do and there was no question about the sprint tasks, they start to work.

Department meetings at each sprint or informative messages. When everyone knew about the Pipeline and there were no technical issues with software, I used this informative messages to quickly distribute tasks without taking time away from the artists.

Communication with the other Leads, Producer and Product Owners to find out what was exactly needed from the art department in each sprint to achieve our game goals.

I have also contributed creating art for the project. Whether it was to chek out the structure of the Pipeline in our own Engine, to cover high priority tasks when my department mates were busy, and because I love create art.

Art Pipeline

2D Concepts: Photoshop

3D Modeling: 3dsMax, Maya

3D Sculpt: ZBrush

3D Paint: Substance Painter, Substance Designer

We were able to use Mixamo to import animations to our characters. Thanks to this software we could save time what allowed us to implement more characters in our game. Although we made all the environment animations and more.

Contribution

GAME TITLE

The Witcher: A Bard's Tale

This is my final version of the Game Title, which is the one we had choosen for the game:

To create the Game Title I started by drawing a composition sketch where I drew a few representative elements of The Witcher universe. Then I started to add some color when I approved the composition and I started to do some tipografy tests before put the original one.

I have finally chosen a more reddish color palette similar to the video game elements (like the swords) so that it will be combined with the color letters and the decoration that I drew.

Finally I added some details like shadows and texture. At the end, I lighted a little bit the title with some point lights to get it more powerful, more live.

Wood Bridge

When I had a little free time without much Lead work, I tried to test the Pipeline that we will use. I did a special prop, I mean, one that it can't be repeated so much, so it provides a unique zone in the game (I really wanted to have a prop in the level).

This was the final result:

To create that Wood Bridge, that is placed in a couple of levels, I start getting a lot of The Witcher bridges references, and also cartoon bridges references. Then I had chosen the best combination and I drew this concept art.

I really liked the idea about to put a horn in a corner of the bridge (it had ended by placing 4 horns, one in each corner). It made the bridge look better I think, and in The Witcher universe fit it a lot.

Once I finished the concept, I started modeling it using 3ds Max. I exported the model into ZBrush where I sculpted it, giving to it a more interesting shapes and wood details.

I looked for an exaggeration of the hard edge faces, similar to this kind of fantasy that Disney uses.

I finally painted it in Substance Painter using the cartoon base that I did for the barrel (down below in the LEVELS section). I changed a little bit the colors and adjusted the tones to get this final result.

First Geralt Model

This was the first model I modeled for Geralt after the Concept Discovery. We realised that we wanted a funnier game, so we opted for a chibi Geralt (it was also faster to create a chibi style considering the time that we had).

I modeled the character in 3ds Max and exported to ZBrush to give him some details

We also used this model in the next sprints. The Design and Code departments use it while they were testing the combat system in Unity for the first time (combos, movement, combat feedback, inputs...)

Rigging

Right before put the Yennefer model into Mixamo to get her animated, we needed to paint her skin weights. So I took the bones that Mixamo readed and I fit them into her body. Finally I painted her weight to let her move perfectly.

Concept Art (Proportions Sketches)

These are some proportions adjustments to later be working on the final Concept Art (with color and detail variations for example).

CHIBI & FUNNY GERALT:

LESHEN:

GHOUL REWORK:

I drew a more realistic Ghoul similar to the TV show/video game. The first design is a rework from the second one. We realised that the second one seemed like a Ben 10 alien similar to a strong dog.

3D Base Terrains

I also made the base terrains of some levels so that colliders, the corresponding textures and all the props could be put into them. I used planes to optimize and I modified its heights using Maya. The Code department gave me specific requirements so we could later use those plans into a Terrain Editor in our Engine, which finally we couldn't implement due the lack of time.

LEVEL 1: BASE TERRAINS.

LEVEL 2: MINE BASE TERRAIN.

I made this Level 1 (forest - swamp zone) Unity scene in the Vertical Slice phase to check for the first time all material maps, UVs, scales, number of polygons (low poly and high poly) and more asset properties that all the artists made. The programmers were building the Engine, so it's because of this I tested this into Unity. When the Engine was ready we put the level into it and we made sure it work perfectly.

I also did a Cartoon Smart Material "Wood" from scratch using Substance Painter. I used the layers that I show in the image right below.

Magical Muffin