Shawn Woods

Character Art – Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts (PC)

Filed Under (3D Design, Art Direction, Characters, Games) by Shawn on 29-09-2008

Tagged Under : 3d, art, artist, character, company of heroes, expansion, game of the year, Games, LinkedIn, model, opposing fronts, pc, relic, relic entertainment, rts, senior artist, supervisor, texture, thq, war

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts (PC)

Expansion Pack to the highest rated RTS game of all time.

I was the Art Supervisor for the Characters team on Opposing Fronts. It was a fun project and great opportunity to work on the expansion to such a highly rated video game. The standards were set very high and with most of the original team moving on, we had a challenge ahead of us.

The Heroes Team (character artists) was filled with 4 people; Melanie Caron, Kristian Bourdage, Stephen McDonald, myself, and Cheol Joo Lee on concept art.

: Soldier lineup from Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts

: Tank Commander unit. This was the early design for the Captain but later changed.

: Tank Commander overpaint to compare it to the Piper model.

: Sapper model and texture.

: ZBrush head without hair.

: ZBrush head with hair. This model was scrapped in the end for looking too old.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

No Comments Read More

UI Design – Dawn of War Games (PC)

Filed Under (2D Design, 3D Design, Games) by Shawn on 29-09-2008

Tagged Under : 40000, 40k, dark crusade, dawn, dawn of war, design, Games, hud, necrons, pc, relic, rts, space marines, starcraft, tau, ui, video, war, warhammer

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War (PC)
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Winter Assault (PC)
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Dark Crusade (PC)
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Soulstorm (PC)
http://www.dawnofwargame.com

I designed the original HUD and Frontend for the PC video game Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. This was actually my first “official” video game to ship although I did assist on the pre-vis UI Design for Homeworld 2.

These screenshots illustrate how I created the Head Up Display (HUD) for the Space Marines race. I started off by setting up a scene in 3D Studio Max using a camera set to Ortho view (I didn’t want any perspective since my measurements had to be precise). After roughing out the shapes in 3D, I rendered out the interface design using Global Illumination to give me a nice, soft render.

I then used these layered renders and brought them into Photoshop, where I continued to color and texture the pieces. You can see a screenshot of the UI Editor I originally used for Dawn of War. At the time, we had no tool to create the interface for our game. Working with two programmers, I designed the look and feel for the UI Editor itself, and helped get the functionality working as well. It ended up working similar to tools I used on a regular basis; Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, and Dreamweaver.

Today, Adobe Flash is being used as the authoring tool, along with Scaleform for the UI Design on Dawn of War 2.

Since the original HUD was not real-time 3D, I could paint textures onto the display as I pleased. The near-finished result is posted below. I’ve also included screenshots from Dawn of War: Dark Crusade where I created the HUD for the Necrons and Tau races.