Lyssa

This design is 2 years overdue... Her name is Lyssa, and she is one of the boss characters from "Warriors: Legends of Troy". This is one of the images that made it into the actual game, out of many attempts to finalize her appearance. This particular drawing dates back to around spring 2009.

Funny storiy about the design process: Lyssa is the goddess of madness, so when I was designing her, I kept on drawing her body as very skinny and dried up, borderline dead flesh. Eventually a decision was made to have her be completely black as she is a nightmare in physical form. So i drew this image as a 3/4 view that went along with the model sheets I also made, and I really emphasised her beaing "dried up dead" :) So the model sheets and this image get sent off to the 3D department and a few weeks voila, my art director sends me the 3D model to look over... and i couldnt help but... smile. The dried up dead look was certainly there, well on most of her body. One thing that was different from my model sheets; Lyssa made a quick stop at the plastic surgeon's, and got a 5 cup size increase :)

Warriors: Legends of Troy

This week marks the release of Warriors: Legends of Troy, the video game that I've been involved with from the beginning of the project. I thought this would be a good time to share what exactly was my role in this journey.

At first I was involved with concept art. This included brainstorming character designs, environments, and overall style. One of the images I was asked to do was supposed to sum up all aspects of the game; one soldier vs many, brutal war, and gritty visuals. And this is the image I came up with:

Few months after that task, my manager came over to tell me that this image was released online with the announcement of the game. At that time it was the only visual revealed so I felt a bit proud. Shortly after More concept work was released in Famitsu (Japanese video game magazine), and Gamespot.com, and these included character concept art. Three of those images were done by me. They were the final design for Griffin (left), Cyclops (middle), and Erinyes (the head was designed by Andrius M.)

In the end, I had over 300 concepts drawn for this game, and the experience boosted my drawing abilities immensely. By the time all these were done, game models were made, and I stepped over to the animation department. This was a rare opportunity because I got to animate characters that I designed, and it felt good to see them in 3D. Since the game is out, the team got permission to make demo reel of our animations with any content we worked on, so here is a small fraction of the animations I have done:

 

So as my closing statement, it was tremendous experience for me to see the development of a AAA title from start to finish. Along for the ride were a bunch of great artist that inspired me and helped me evolve. Huge thank you goes out to

Duy Nguyen, Michael Carnovale, Brian Paquette, Ryan Bailey, Jacob Lickers, Louise Kim,  Dennis Dunn, Aaron Mclean, Craig D. Adams, Sungjune Kim, Nick Papadopoulos, Takayuki Minato, Chul Jang, Inga Mazetyte, Koei Baltija studio, and my 2 supervisors, Takahiro Sakuma (animation) and Toshiyuki Takeyasu (CG manager/art director)

...And all this sums up to: