Merry Christmas from the Pixl Glass

Hi Folks!  This has been quite a busy holiday season for me the past few weeks.  I've just returned from visiting my grandmother for her 90th birthday.  It was great getting to spend time with her and the rest of my family who gathered together to celebrate.  I can only hope to live so long and so well!

I have some great new interviews lined up which will start fresh in the new year.  So enjoy your Christmas, Hanukkah, or whatever you may be celebrating.  I hope it's filled with friends, family, and good cheer!

A Modeler with Character

As early as 6,000 B.C., humans have been sculpting their interpretation of the human form. Today that practice is still very much alive in our physical and digital mediums.

Character artists are responsible for producing the people and creatures we embody and interact with in our video games. Whether you're playing as, talking with, or fighting against these characters, they all have one thing in common: the player must believe in them. If they don't appear to belong in the world they inhabit, or have an appealing look, players will reject them and won't buy into the world.

Jonathan Nascone is a Senior Character Artist for Cryptic Studios currently working on Star Trek Online. Jon is responsible for creating new and interesting takes on established character designs in order to provide players with unique appearances for the myriad of cultures that make up the Star Trek universe. A self-style digital sculptor, Jon is happy to just sit at home with Z-brush molding a virtual clay ball into whatever he can imagine.


Why is the character artist role important for the success of a game?

For Star Trek Online we recently announced the game is adopting a free to play model. In F2P a part of that is costuming your character with items like weapons or clothing. We are making an abundance of quality pieces which people can either earn through in-game means or purchase with real money. Characters are just one piece of the puzzle for our game.

As a character artist, especially one on the Star Trek MMO, we have guidelines to go by and cannon to follow. It's a challenge to try to take those established ideas and make them into fresh and new quality pieces. As a character artist on our team we really try to make items that players really want to have. It's fun knowing we can make these cool pieces for the player to go out and acquire.

Working here at Cryptic has been a really interesting adventure so far. You have to learn a bit of programming and a lot of things artists don't typically do. The engine is pretty robust but it takes a good year to master all the ins and outs. I'm 5 months in and I'm still learning how parts of it work.

As a character artist at other companies I was never responsible for rigging and skinning. Things like that were the responsibility of the technical artist. I have an understanding about how to model a character so it deforms properly but I would never actually go through and put in bones, skin the character, then bring them into the engine. It's a lot of extra work and I kind of miss just doing character art but I'm becoming a better and more well-rounded artist for it.

It sounds like you take a character through from beginning to end at Cryptic: model, texture, rig, import into the engine, then make sure it works for all the needs of the game.

Ya, then past the engine to the actual tailor. I set up screenshots for marketing and I'll set up the character with the tools which the player will use to purchase it on the web by doing some coding and stuff. You do it twice too. You make one costume, but it has to have both male and female variants. We get 3 weeks to a month to make one costume set. The art itself is only the first 1/3 or less. The rest of the time is clean up and getting it set up with all the game systems.


Are you given some artistic license to come up with new character pieces like clothing or weapons in order to create something fresh and new that still fits within the cannon of the established Star Trek cultures?

That's been one of the hardest things. We're a small team, roughly 30 people. They're all diehard Star Trek fans. They know the fiction inside and out. I came onto the team not having played MMOs. I like Star Trek but just don't know much about it. I'm learning more about the cannon and the MMO genre every day. So automatically my take on the material is kind of different because I don't come from that background. My first few months were spent learning about the different races and their color palettes, the kind of outfits they wore, and what materials they're made from.

Once you get that kind of base knowledge down then you can start taking those themes and making a spin on that. They do encourage that here at work. We have some concept artists who will create rough sketches and then we go to town and do iterations on our assigned pieces which are later approved by the art director.

Now that I better understand the races, the Klingons for example, I can take the basis for them and really play with it the best I can so you will recognize the design as Klingon but in a fresh new way. So long as we have iconic callback pieces like the emblem of the empire usually the community will like it.

Occasionally we'll have fans call us out for things being not correct. We had an issue where we added a starship from one of the movies. This is a ship that is onscreen in the film for less than a second. It was modeled in the game with something like 86 windows instead of 87 and one of the fans caught it. They went through and counted each one in-game. So we went back and fixed it. We have some very passionate, diehard fans and as an artist you get a little bit wary sometimes because you want to make sure it's "right" in their eyes but also novel. It's an interesting challenge. I'm always learning new stuff.


Speaking of challenges, what is the greatest challenge you have had to overcome, either with a personal project or professionally?

There were a lot of challenges when I worked at Ubisoft. The studio was at first created to work on DS and PSP games. They got the go ahead from France to work on something new for a different system. So in order to make this bigger product they took the staff they already had, who were great at what they did, and hired up a lot more quality people. I had great co-workers who were talented artists but the direction for how to go about making this new big thing, which was ten times the size and complexity of a handheld game, created a lot of conflict and problems.

That was a real challenge to try and stay on track and try to make this thing become reality. At this point it still hasn't but I think as a team we learned to communicate, brainstorm, and have effective meetings. Being part of the core team to actually have creative input on the game was really cool. I try to take that knowledge for having effective communication and presenting my ideas cohesively with a team everywhere I go.


What work are you most proud of? Why?

It's hard to ask an artist that question! To us nothing's ever quite finished, it can always be improved. I think everything I do, either personally or at work, I try to get better with every project or assignment. I can't honestly say there's something that's the best I've ever done before because I know it's not.

I'm definitely proud of all the games I've worked on. I'm proud of the things that I've done on my blog. I know they aren't perfect or finished so they're definitely things to work on. There's no one particular piece that stands out above the rest.


What is it about your current employer or the game industry in general that makes you want to come into work every day?

I don't consider what I do to be just a job but my career. I know it's weird but I know certain people have jobs where they go to work in the morning and want to be out of there right at quitting time, if not sooner. With doing art and video games I don't feel that way. I've worked many jobs in the past where I tried to get in and out as fast as I can, just earn your money and go. We're in a creative field even though some of our creativity is focused in certain ways. I don't take what I get to do for granted at all. I've worked really hard to get here so I can't come to work and not care and just do my 9-5 and be done.

To be able to make an experience that people get to play, it's really cool. When I made my first asset for Brothers in Arms and actually saw it in the game, that was the coolest thing ever. This weapon I made: you can play with it in the game. People around the world can use it. They don't know I made it but the satisfaction that it's in there is so gratifying.

Working at America's Army and seeing our blood, sweat, and tears go into making the product was a really good feeling. I never cared about having my name out there knowing an object or character was from me, but the fact that I know I was a part of something like that is the best feeling ever. I'm proud to be able to say, "Ya, I worked on that"!

So when I come to work every day, even though I'm learning about Star Trek and other new stuff, it's fun things to learn! I'm getting to create something new and unique every day that people can see and play with. I wouldn't trade it for anything.


Are there any techniques or best practices you have learned or developed that have served you well?

It's really simple. I think being an artist nowadays with tools changing every 6 months to a year you really have to never turn off that desire to learn, to try to better yourself and your skill set. I've known artists in the past who have felt they've learned all they need to and they can just do their work with the same tools forever. But things change so rapidly you NEED to have that hunger to always keep learning and try to better yourself in order to be able to survive in a creative field like games or movies.

It doesn't matter what tool you learn, there are so many. Pick a few you want to go with and keep learning from other artists who use those tools and try to better yourself whether you're at school or at your job or wherever you're at. That's really important to keep having that hunger to learn and better yourself. Don't be afraid to share that knowledge with your classmates or coworkers.

At Ubisoft we could volunteer to teach courses on site. We'd tell HR we wanted to lead a seminar on a particular subject and they would help us set it up. It was a great environment for sharing knowledge between artists.