Skylander's Swap Force: Elemental Zones

Skylanders Swap Force

Elemental Zones

Just coming off of being the Art Lead on Skylanders Battlegrounds, I was asked to help out on Swap Force.  Since I was coming on over halfway through the project, there wasn't an opportunity for me to take ownership of a map.  However, I was giving ownership of the Elemental Zones - the key to toy sales in the Skylander's marketing strategies.  Another artist had gone through and made a handful of textures and a few assets, so it was mostly my responsibility to take those assets and cater (sometimes alter) them into things that can be used to creating and staging the zones.  I was able to create base lighting coats before the lighting artist came in and finalized it for ship.  Finally, since the effects artists were slammed with their work, it was my job to create effects and destructibles to put the final touches to the zones.

Fire Zone

Undead Zone

Earth Zone

Tech Zone

Magic Zone

Life Zone

I was very fortunate in that we had a fixed camera placed by the designers.  This afforded me the ability to cater every shot without worrying too much about what the player might accidentally see.  However, in the following two shots, I was able to have explicit control over the game cameras.  I set it up so that the camera had more of a "side-scrolling" orthographic view which was unique to the game.

Undead Zone

Air Zone

In some cases, it was required to have two elements represented with the same zone. In the below examples, we see this with the Fire/Water Zone and the Magic/Life Zone.  This posed quite the challenge.  There was no time to create unique assets so I had to pull from existing ones to cobble together zones that "made sense" with both elements.

Water/ Fire Zone

Magic/ life Zon

Handheld Days...

Skylanders: Battlegrounds

iPad and iPhone

Being Art Lead on a handheld has many challenges.  But this project posed even more than the usual.  I was given a small team, mostly made up of VFX artists and a couple of UI folks.  We were given a pretty short amount of time as well.  My responsibilities included scheduling, concepts, asset/ level construction, lighting, and mentoring/ supporting the artists.  I ended up asking my VFX counterpart to share in the responsibilities because it was a great deal to manage.

The image below shows our main map.  Given time constraints, I needed to take advantage of existing "Skylander" assets and optimize them to suit the handheld memory limitations.  This wasn't easy because the assets needed to be readable on a smaller screen - they were console assets designed for television.  The textures needed to be optimized, yet still hold onto the flavor of its original size.  We thought it would be cool to get a board-game feel to it so I kept the characters at a large scale but reduced the elemental specific assets in size to add a little more depth to each tile.

The arena screens needed to be built the same way as the map screen in terms of asset harvesting and refactoring.  I staged the arenas so that the details stayed at the edge of the screen as to not intrude into the game-play area.  To light the maps, we used the bake solution from Call of Duty called Arclight to bake all of our lightings to atlases.

Personal Sketches

Personal Art Work

Pencil Sketches and Tonal Studies

When I lived in Orlando, in my early years of college studies, I was introduced by a gentleman by the name of Eddie Pittman.  At the time he was with Walt Disney Animation.  Eddie suggested to me that if I wanted to go into computer animation, studying traditional animation first was the key.  So I applied to Sheridan College in Toronto, Ontario, was accepted.  It was an intensive 3 years of boot camp like exercises in art but it was well worth the long hours.  Below is just a small collection of some sketches and tonal studies.

Resume

‍‍Matt Helsom

604 Schooner Court Clifton Park, NY 12065 | (518) 944-9229 | matt.helsom@gmail.com     matthelsom.blogspot.com

Objective

·    Never stop making art and never grow up.

Education

Bachelor of fine arts | 2005 | Art Institute of fort lauderdale

Degree in classical animation | 2003 | sheridan college

Skills & Abilities

senior artist

·    Building and staging environments from start to completion

·    Texture painting and material building on the different renderers we’ve had (from forward to deferred)

·    Modeling a wide range of needs from small props to full levels

·    Educating myself and my peers on the latest technology advancements so that we may hone our building techniques to better suit the needs of those advancements

·    Base knowledge of lighting and visual effects to fill gaps in production

art lead

·    Art direction and execution

·    Scheduling and milestone targeting/developing

·    Effectively communicate the vision to the stakeholders as well as the team

Software

3DS Max, Maya, ZBrush, Topogun, xNormal, Crazybump, Substance: Designer and Painter, Photoshop, After Effects, Premier, Lab (proprietary game dev package to Vicarious Visions), Radiant, Speedtree

Experience

senior artist | vicarious visions |2007 - present 

·    In the ten years at the studio I moved from being a UI artist to an art lead on several projects to finally moving onto an environment artist.

project manager/ 2D & 3D artist | crescent moon games | 2010 - 2011

·    I was project manager and 2D/ 3D artist

adjunct instructor | itt technical institute | 2004 - 2007

·    I was responsible for educating students that had a desire to move into a career in multi-media.  As well, it was my job to write curriculum and syllabus for the needs of the department.

Shipped Titles

Skylander’s SuperChargers: Senior Environment Artist
Skylander’s Swap Force:  Senior Environment Artist
Skylander’s Battlegrounds: Lead Artist
Paper Monsters: Project Manager| 2D/3D Artist
Skylander’s Spyro’s Adventure: Environment Artist
Guitar Hero iPhone: Prototype Creator
Mixed Messages: Lead Artist
Guitar Hero 4: Lighting Artist
Guitar Hero DS: Lead Artist
Guitar Hero DS: Decades: Lead Artist
Spiderman 3: UI Artist
Spiderman 3 DS: Environment Artist