Project Description & Responsibilities
I was the Lead Artist at CCP North America where we developed Sparc. I was involved in the project since it’s inception as the Lead Artist for CCPs Virtual Reality Research & Development team based in Atlanta, GA.
Responsibilities include:
Art Direction
IP Development
Environment Art
World Building
Level Design
UE4 Shader & Blueprint Designer
Lighting Artist
UI Designer & Artist
User Experience Design
Outsourcing Manager
Content Pipeline Development
Sparc is a virtual sport – a unique full-body, fast-paced, and physical experience only possible in virtual reality, where your VR equipment is your sports gear.
History of Sparc: VR Labs Disk Wars Demo
Sparc was originally conceived as a tech demo in early 2015 by a seven person research and development team code named CCP VR Labs. That tech demo, Disk Wars, began as a competitive multiplayer experience using a Frankenstein assortment of hardware including an Oculus DK2 paired with a Kinect.
History of Sparc: Freeform Social VR
The idea of a court side experience was a result of social VR experiments; the concept was to provide the feel of hanging out around an arcade machine with your friends in a free form social space.
New Channel
Sparc
Visual Direction
The visual direction I established for Sparc centered around creating a clean design to observe and play sports matches in. I focused the detail of the environment on the court so that as the world radiates out to its extents, it becomes simpler and more clean. This direction also is intended to assist in counterbalancing the performance rendering challenges of virtual reality.
Environment & World Building
For Sparc's court-side environments I used the repetition of shape and form theory to communicate scene depth and define the separation of conceptual game play spaces. One example of this are the rings which establish world scale and acts as an in-game chaperone for the players.
I created the Brawl Court geometry and material assignments in Maya before taking it into Unreal Engine 4 for shading.
I generated a series of mask maps to utilize UE4's PBR material networks for applying surface styles and surface normal details to the assets. This allowed visual variants through UE4 Material Instances and asset combinations.
I created various key props and assets including the Sparc projectile and projectile spawner to leverage UE4s PBR material shader system. These also utilized zone maps to apply colors based off the users in-game color customization choices.
Physical User Interface
Sparc features a physical 3D interactive user interface designed to exist with the user in virtual space. I designed and built the various UI menus in Unreal Engine 4 using a combination of custom widgets (authored by our engineers), blueprints, animated meshes, and the UMG tool set.
Single Player Challenges
Sparc also features a series of single player challenges designed to allow the player to hone their skills by performing the basic game actions, the results are tracked on global leader boards. All of which required unique visual direction which I orchestrated.
Cross Platform Online Play
The heart of the game is in the online competitive multiplayer matches, which happen in a standardized court.
The court-side world is designed to facilitate up to 4 players in a completely free-form social environment. Players in the court and at court-side see, hear, and interact with each other in real time.
This is where all the visual design elements come together to deliver the creative direction for the product.