As Lead Level Artist at the prototyping phase of the project (prior to moving on to becoming Third Party Art Director) I helped to set the artistic style of the prototype's levels and the direction we intended to go during development of the game itself. My responsibilities included creating most of the pre-prototype and prototype level tiles for our random dungeon generator in addition a number of character animations to allow for quick testing of gameplay mechanics. All combined, the prototype included six modular tile types, two versions of each having unique content plus one unique "end" arena, a "theatre", for the end boss fight. I'll be sure to update images from the prototype soon but you can see an overview Maya Playblast (although somewhat dark) and an image below of the "Temple Pit" which was one of the "dead end" tiles. While they appear small in the playblast, each of the tiles were quite large, 50x50 meters. The primitive, prototype art is obvious as most tiles were created in only one to two days in Maya. In the end, we decided not to go ahead with randomly generated dungeons and opted for the more "Lord of the Rings"-style, linear levels. Happily enough though, a number of textures I created during this early phase can still be seen throughout the final game.

Ruined Temple Fly Cam (LARGE 22MB)

Ruined Temple Fly Cam (SMALL 11MB)

After returning to the team mid- and post-Third Party, I began creating many of our level blockins for both our design team as well as our external art house, Nikitova, to begin creating actual level art. In addition to these rough, undetailed blockins that provided mostly scale and location for concepted art, I would create a single game-level-of-detail piece that showcased a particular section of the world or a combination of elements that comprised several pieces of concept art to provide a sense of flavor as well as indicate the given poly budget for a specific landmark in the level. Given our short schedule, we were only able to create a few of these before switching to full production, however many of my actual dioramas found their way incorporated into the final levels via Nikitova.

Elven Crossing Diorama:	Imperial Palace Diorama:
Lower City Diorama:	Imperial Dungeons (1-4) Diorama:
BLOCKIN A: (NOT UPLOADED)	BLOCKIN B: (NOT UPLOADED)
BLOCKIN C: (NOT UPLOADED)	BLOCKIN D: (NOT UPLOADED)

After wrapping up level blockins and dioramas I became Lead Cinematics Artist and was responsible for all cinematics in the game. Given the enormous size of the story and the decreasing size of our team, "Story Mode" was cut (along with 6 months of my and the rest of the team's work on cinematics to that point, unfortunately). Starting from scratch, all of the new "Mini-Cinematics" had to be created in two months. I created 90 cinematics to showcase introductions and establishing shots of new levels, special areas in levels, gameplay-related cinematics such as bridges lowering or items of interest to the player, introductions to special characters such as sorcerer-type enemies and "Death" as well as introductions and death scenes for all bosses in the game. Not only responsible for creating camera-work but I created virtually all particle systems used during all cinematic types through Renderware Studio and directed all participating artists to wrap up Gauntlet's cinematic needs on time and of the highest quality. Additional management responsibilities included directing specific mocap shoots and working closely with the animators that supplied the animations for those cinematics that involved characters (Aaron Carlson, Sam Heine and Dave Tully; all of whom were a pleasure to work with).