The Callisto Protocol - 2022
I had the great opportunity to join Striking Distance Studios as their Character Director, right at the beginning, in September 2019, and ship TCP in December 2022.
We were roughly 35 people at that time, led by Glen Schofield, starting a new studio, from scratch. New project, new IP, new Engine for most of us (Unreal 4). New team.
In less than a year we grew the team to around 120 people and then up to 200 people.
We poured our hearts into The Callisto Protocol, and couldn’t be prouder of what we achieved in 3.5 years, especially on the art front.
We got Nominated for multiple awards, including VES - OUTSTANDING ANIMATED CHARACTER IN AN EPISODE, COMMERCIAL OR REAL-TIME PROJECT and DICE - Best Art Direction in videogames
THE CALLISTO PROTOCOL :: PS5, PS4, Xbox X, Xbox S, XboxOne, Steam, SteamDeck
Supervising and Directing all Character related things and managing the Character Art group (Head of Dept).
Worked closely with production on scheduling and scope.
Working closely with C-Staff during production to ensure vision and pillars are being delivered on brand, and Game Director (Glen), pushing Art to the next level.
Responsible for building Visual Targets, developing Character Art Pipelines for Digital Humans and Realistic Creatures, working closely with most departments (Concept, Animation, Engineering, Tech, Design and Rendering Teams) to ensure maximum visual fidelity (and fun) across the project.
Worked with Concept Team, Design Team, following the entire creature/character pipeline. Supervising concept, to model, rig, animation, combat, ai, vfx etc.
Responsible for designing and driving/Directing the Gore System along with Jorge Jimenez and Jon Diego. Working and directing Art Leads to align on vision and mechanics.
Working closely with Engineering and Tech Art on closing the game, being part of the small core team driving the performance effort, going from gpu captures (razor) and making recommendations based on raw data, to unit stats analysis in game, coordinating with rendering and tech art teams to deliver the message to artists on what/when/how to optimize.
Working closely with Design, VFX and Lighting on features such Flashlight, Death systems, Pcaps and Scripted Events, Dynamic materials on enemies and weapons.
Supervising Trailers, Marketing, Covers, and any external media representing our brand, signing off on Art assets.
Managed a group of 6 artists directly and 4 external vendors, plus more indirectly.
GDC Talk - 2023
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1029339/The-Character-Rendering-Art-of
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Mastering Horror | The Callisto Protocol Docuseries: Episode 1
How The Callisto Protocol's Gameplay Was Perfected Months Before Release | Ars Technica
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Interviews - https://sds.com/news/glauco-longhi-character-director/
Jacob
Our main character. The credit list is huge on this one and a ton of people worked on this asset or around him, so the best thing is to acknowlegde the work that was put into it. From Concept Art, To Modeling, Rigging, Animation, Engineering, Rendering, Texturing, Lighting. Design. You name it. Everybody touches one way or the other the main character. It is the most important character in the game and the asset that gets passed the most. I truly love that collab.
I do want to highlight main contributors to this one. Robin Chyo, Jesse Lee, Carlo Balassu with Concept art, Csaba Molnar, building the prisoner suit, working on the space suit and doing a texture/beauty pass on his face, Siamak and Carter collabing on Suit/Helmet, Martin Contel for a lot of technical and artistic work around matching his face with the scans, working on eyes, textures, wrinkle maps, beard, hair.
John Lee for owning the entire rig and technical art, alongside with Jon Robins, Kelvin Chu, Snappers for working with us on the facial rig, Airship for delivering a very solid hair card base that we modified and adjusted as needed. Jorge Jimenez and the entire rendering team on pushing technology that allowed us to get these realtime results, in game. All of these images are taken directly from the editor, running at frame.
My responsability was to direct and coordinate the entire effort. I sculpted, worked on hair, prototypes, proportions, blood, sweat, shaders, materials, technology, cinematics. Did some lighting, work on key art, posters, and so on.
Jorge Jimenez was responsible for pushing the entire digiDouble pipeline on the rendering side.
3DScanLa helped us scanning the clothing, and yours truly was wearing them.
Me and Jorge Jimenez will be presenting at GDC in March this year (2023) about the Rendering Art for Characters and we will go in-depth on a lot of the challenges and techniques, and mostly important, the mindset that allowed us to break new grounds when it comes to art directable digi doubles for videogames.
Jacob has been nominated for VES - OUTSTANDING ANIMATED CHARACTER IN AN EPISODE, COMMERCIAL OR REAL-TIME PROJECT
Big Mouth
Big Mouth was the first enemy we finalized for Callisto Protocol. It went through several iterations by concept and character teams, starting with Elias Ravenetti and Taibing Zhang , and ultimately we landed on this version, a collaboration initially concepted by Jesse Lee and modelled/finished by myself.
There is another post where I share all the experiments me and Jesse did around the first enemy and Big Mouth per say. Great collaboration between different teams and this is the part I love about making games, working together.
Taibin Zheng did the final textures and material tweaks on the in-game model.
A lot of effort goes into creating these characters, from conceptual ideas, design, mechanics, animation, modeling, rigging, texturing, engineering, shaders, materials, devops, and so on. Credit goes to everybody contributing directly or indirectly to allow these models to exist.
Grunt - Visual Target
Throughout the project, realism was a main pillar for us to hit on everything. As our approach to DigiDoubles/Characters evolved, our take on creatures evolved as well.
This one started with a scan of Clay Sparks (Otoy) and some lose concept art by our Concept Team, mainly the fantastic Mike Franchina, and evolved into having some fun with shapes and forms.
This served as a visual target around style and form for the project, along other work as well.
This guy can be seen in the shimmy, stuck and wrapped into tendrils and fascia, done by Larry Kameen.
Hair Work / RnD
I spent quite some time working on hair during this project, especially early on.
We had a vision on how to achieve and explore different techniques and features. Here are a few experiments using strands/cards/geometry.
We also built a custom shader network and tried different shading models.
Had a ton of fun working with Jorge Jimenez on these tests, learned a lot.
None of these made into the game but the lessons and learnings did :)
Final assets for Jacob and other main characters - in-game were cards built by Airship and modified/enhanced by our internal team, with custom textures, shaders and proprietary features.
Miscelaneous
Sketches, exploration, NPC heads, shaders, and lots of miscelaneous things
Leviathan
Leviathan is the big creature Mahler has been studying for some time.
Joyce XU was working on the concept for the room and vista shot and we did some initial collaboration on the design and needs for this creature, while I was designing and coming up with interesting and menacing shapes and definitely have some fun with size, scale and lots of teeth.
Larry Kameen later polished the textures, materials and added more textural details to the model, after some design changes around the level and how this area played out.
Rusher
The Rusher was designed by Mike Franchina.
Sculpted and modelled by Siamak Roshani.
First pass textures by Siamak. I did final polish textures and look dev.
(Saliva here is temp)
Taibing Zhang did final textures on the variants with Siamak.
Shalia Wynn worked on shaders along with Farhan Noor for camouflage
Gore System
I was in charge of designing and developing the gore system alongside with Jorge Jimenez and Kelvin Chu.
I later directed the art and strike team, taking it to the finish line.
A lot of people worked on this system. Main Engineer was Jon Diego Martinez, which played an imense role on building, developing and establishing the very scalable system.
Fabio Silva was in charge of driving the VFX for blood and spatters.
Pablo J De Andres worked hard on scanning and developing blood spatters textures, materials, brains.
A lot of support from Tech team and Char Tech Team, Gameplay engineer, and studio overall.
The gore system became a foundation for a lot of gameplay features, combat, cinematics and death sequences.
MISC / Art Direction
I had the pleasure on participating on different endeavors across multi disciplines.
I was approving all the artwork going outside to the world, together with Demetrius and Glen, and C-Staff.
That gave me the opportunity to not only direct but also set the tone and bar for different all the different trailers, posters, cover arts, key arts, live action campaigns, interviews, and so on.
A few examples:
In Game Death Sequences
Lit, composed and polished by me, setting the tone and mood for the death sequences as a whole. It also helped to solve technical questions along the dismemberment system, blood, character variants.
Game Informer Cover Art
The Game Informer cover was lit, posed, composed and rendered by me, and final touches and polishes by Csaba Molnar
Opening Cinematic
Art Direction with Aasim Zubair on opening in-game cinematic, mood and feel.
Key Art
Lighting and Art Direction/Mood. A lot of artists worked on this piece.
