Watch Dogs Legion

Year

2018

Role

Senior Concept artist & initial character art direction

Synopsis

Being given full creative autonomy for shaping the production pipelines, outsourcing requirements and the initial look of the core innovation "Play as anyone" kicking off the project with my own vision concepts was a true honor as it required unprecedented problem-solving to avoid replication issues in the build and represent every world character as a potentially worthy hero for a near future London setting. Tim Anderson handled the mask direction while I was responsible for the style breakdown, subculture representation, planning, and asset pooling necessary for the general look of the feature as well as helping brand with character briefs for key-arts and promos. Below are just a handful of samples of materials that ermeged from this massive task.

On this project, I investigated the execution of the play as anyone feature which involved extensive background research on tech that would solve the issue of replication in the crowds highly prevalent in previous games while meeting our loading restrictions. It involved using region hiding to generate visually diverging versions of any asset to the burden on tech, effectively making all character assets modular in a number of ways (geometry and color) , as well as restricting combinations reuse. The overarching system was based on tagging items, combinations of items and organizing them into relevant data pools based on cultural research. That allowed our tool to preassemble characters that could be reviewed and validated for inclusion also being representative of certain styles and demographics and would automatically exclude any duplicates when loading in real-time. I was also responsible for working with TA's and the character team to organize documentation and review for outsourcing compliance with the assembly system.
Watch dogs Legion | Initial character art direction (Artists: Trailer Team)

Other credits