Early in my career as a game developer, I worked at a social gaming start-up in San Francisco, CA called Zynga. I was a 3D artist and I got the chance to create a bunch of art for CityVille, a Facebook social game released in 2010 that was heavily inspired by games like Sim City that came before it. It was a lot of fun and I learned so much while working with such a great team.
So yeah, I wasn’t always a tech artist. I actually started my career as an artist, and I like to look back on the work I did and the experiences I gained that have helped shape who I am today and how I do my job now. In light of that, I want to post more of these “art dumps” of my past work as an artist, interspersed between the more technical content. And of course, let’s start with CityVille, a game I spent around 2 years working on, circa 2010.
A little context about the assets: They were rendered 2D sprites of up to 4 isometric angles based on 3D scenes authored in Maya and finalize, then rendered out in 3DS Max. A combination of techniques were used to achieve the look we wanted. Most materials were created with built-in shader parameters and tiling patterns in 3DS Max. Photoshop was used for more complex texture patterns and occasional touch-ups were sometimes made directly to the rendered 2D sprites.
