25 Anniversary 2/2: ELB archives 2006/2010

In 2005, ELB began working on the production of "Arthur and the Invisibles" in association with Luc Besson. New artists were hired specifically for this game to have a Parisian team.
I fullly made this room where Arthur start his journey.

We had to be as faithful as possible to the movie.
We also had to create a lot of creatures and additional content.
Like here the Zeleeft, which was a gameplay asset working as an elevator. I made it in 2 colors.

The "Krominos" was used as a pushing block. Original Krominos was made by Sarah Mercier. I only did the texture retake.

This spider boss was urgently requested. The character team didn't feel like making it in 3 days.
So I offered to make it.
It was challenging because the time left was short.
But it was fun: I had no concept, I had to create it from scratch.

Some real-size texture samples.
16 or 256 colors.
average size: 128x128 / 256x256
On this production, I was focused on the texturing department.
I made hundreds of textures but little modeling.

The game was still lit painting color vertex.
The Mul-Mul was a luminous ball character.
Originally created in modeling, I suggested that we replace it with a sprite
Then I made a simple alpha, and the result was much more convincing.

As the Parisian team was relatively junior, the level of quality was not always what we expected.
As I was more experienced with lighting and texturing, I have been asked to do a lot of retakes.
Here, the Palace I textured and polished.

This asset was done using my tiling textures library.
The original version had a lot of problems.
It had lighting, transparency and polish issues wich I had to fix.

Gameplay asset. Texture and lighting had to be redone.
That was my task.

Bee texture/polish/optimisation

Ant texture/polish/optimisation

Plants texture/polish/optimisation.
The leaves of the original version were much more greedy in vertex because their thickness had been modeled.

On this object the retake took place before the object was finished.
Original work by Sarah Mercier.
I almost didn't touch anything on the lower part.

Darkos texture retake.

King texture retake.

In game version

I won't talk much about Spyro because for me it's one of the worst productions I've worked on.
Our engine was too old to correctly display normal maps.
It was decided to boost glossiness and had an orange bloom. The whole game render looked oily and ugly

On most ELB productions, we didn't have an artistic director and decisions were made by the studio manager.
These choices were decisive in the final rendering of the game.
It was difficult to bring subtlety to the textures since the render was broken.

Another retake: the forest

In 2008 we were working on "How to train your dragon" in collaboration with Dreamworks.

Retopoly by Michael Intilla .
I made the material and polish of "Stoïk", trying to be closer as possible as the movie version.
It was also usual for me to work on characters sometimes. At the time the workflows were really very similar.

PS3 constraints:
-a lot more tris
-no PBR yet, but nice shaders:
Diffuse/ Specular/ normal map
-lighting: lightmaps
-diffuse: no color limitation
-average texture size: 512x512

With my teamate Sébastien Riondet, we made the whole village. He was modeling the houses. I was texturing and polishing them.

lit/unlit versions
We were able to use color vertex blendind materials.

generic assets. I didn't had any concept art for these.
I had the opportunity to design them freely.

I also made the trees, grass,... without concept arts.

I had to make some of the dragons, like here Night Fury

We didn't use baking yet (except for light informations). Texturing + normal were made in Photoshop.

This dragon was created at ELB. He doesn't belong to the movies.

Textured version

Deadly Nadder

In game village

The forge

Hiccup
Original work by Laurent Dury.
I just retouch the texture and add
polished hair cards.

hiccup detail
Original work by Laurent Dury.
I just retouch the texture and add
polished hair cards.

This one was just a retake for me. I did the polish part.

Random female character

I was completely free on this one since I didn't have any concepts either