Modeler and texture artist Stellan Johansson works on look development of high-end games in Scandinavia and Spain.
CGSociety :: Artist Profile
28 October 2008, by Jeroen Maton
Stellan Johansson is a 3D-modeler, texture-artist and GUI/HUD artist, working at GRIN in Spain.
He graduated from Playgroundsquad, a game-development school in Falun, Sweden. The course went for a year and a half, and he remembers basically living at the school, modeling for over ten hours a day, all the way to graduation. “This is without a doubt where I learned the most before heading off into the industry,” says Johansson. “Pretty soon, I went to work on ‘Enemy Territory: Quake Wars’ with the crew at Splash Damage in London, and then id Software.”
His career took off after that, with projects spanning the top and south of the EC. "I moved back to Sweden and took a job at GRIN, the creators of the 'Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter' series for PC," Johansson explains. "I'm now on 'Bionic Commando', 'Bionic Commando: Rearmed' and the newly-announced 'Wanted,’ back in Barcelona, where I currently live."
GRIN Game Office in Stockholm.
At GRIN, while working on 'Bionic Commando: Rearmed', Stellan was responsible for all the bosses and mechanical enemies.
'Bionic Commando: Rearmed' contains a lot of 3D assets. He worked through a lot of difficulties while working on them through the production.
“I confronted the main challenge at the start of production,” explains Stellan. “I had never really focused on doing more stylized or cartoon-oriented objects before, and had to re-think the way I was doing art for games.” He studied a lot of boss fights of other games, especially the Capcom ones, to get a good sense of how things were done during the NES and SNES-era. “I looked at shapes, coloring, effects, movement,” Johansson says, “anything that could be inspirational for my own work.”
Along the way, Johansson learned the importance of simplicity, pursuing a really solid main shape and silhouette. He worked a lot with base-colors instead of focusing on the smaller details. “This is a way of thinking that can be applied to most types of art,” he explains. “So when modeling, I went a bit chunkier with shapes and bevels, to make them stand out in the final normal-map, especially since the models are quite small on screen.”
“The environments were quite tricky as well. Since most of the world is built up of square blocks to follow the original level-design, the difficult part here was to make them look seamless and non-tiling, especially the mountains and cave-sections. We had to cut down a lot of detail in the texture, focusing more on the material color to make it look good. The good thing about working with tiling blocks is that it is just so easy and fast to build with, as opposed to creating huge unique meshes for each section.”
