Blade Runner (Game) - Art concepts / Animate background scenes [Westwood Studios, Eric Chadwick]

Eric Chadwick (Digital Artist)

Outsource Team Art Director
In 1996 I directed an outsource team of seven artists at Mondo Media in creating pre-rendered 3D environments for the Westwood Studios game Blade Runner.

Interview:

Did your team create all the backdrops in the game?

A: No, we were an outsource company, creating contract art for Westwood Studios.
The company name was Mondo Media. We made a couple games of our own, then branched out into content creation for other developers.
We made game art for many of the big developers and publishers. I think we made 20-30 sets for Blade Runner.



Did Westwood Studios give you concept arts, and did you create a 3D models (Backgrounds) with animation?

Yes, they provided 2D concepts, plus a couple example 3D scenes to use as inspiration. We modeled and textured everything,
and added the animated elements. We had a lot of fun squeezing all kinds of little animated elements in there.

Personally, I worked on the animated water elements. Puddles, rain drops, misty streetlights, and steam coming out of vents.



Did you convert everything at once to the Westwood Studios VQA format?

We sent Westwood the uncompressed render frames, as TGA files. They did all the compression themselves.
We just needed to fit within the 640x480 resolution, at 15 frames per second, and four seconds of looping animation.
We then provided the source 3D scenes, so Westwood could generate masks for the characters, to look like they were going behind and around things.



What you were doing in 1996 was a breakthrough technology!
How did the collaboration with Westwood Studios affect further work?
The game won the title of Game of the Year. And this is also your merit!

Thanks. We definitely learned a ton on that job. Westwood was transitioning from art tools in DOS to tools in Windows, and we were part of that transition.
We converted several scenes from 3D Studio DOS into 3ds Max. None of the procedural textures would translate, like Smoke and Noise, so those had to be recreated.
We could also do true volumetric effects in 3ds Max, so we made the misty effects into volume lights with animated procedural noise textures, to look like misty falling rain.
We used the Blade Runner work as a calling card when talking with other developers and publishers, and it really helped us get more work.
Jobs like the 3D Aladdin game for Disney Interactive, the Mechwarrior 3 game for Activision, Motor City Online for Electronic Arts, we got these jobs directly because of our previous work on Blade Runner.



Did you have any difficulties working with this project?

One tough thing we had to do was include animated people into one of the shots.
This would have been prohibitively time-consuming to animate as a 3D character,
so we shot ourselves on video and rotoscoped this into the scenes.