Lucas Hardi

Character Art

Going back to 2003 working on Dark Age of Camelot, character art was my entry point into the game industry. Most recently, I was the Lead Character Artist on Starfield at Bethesda Game Studios

I designed and completed this spacesuit (minus the mismatched helmet).

Prior to Starfield, I worked on Skyrim and Fallout 4, where I developed character art pipelines that would enabled efficient production cycles for our teams of internal and external artists.

Hard surface modeling to retopologize the iconic Power Armors in Fallout 4. These meshes were used in costume production for the Fallout TV show on Amazon Prime

I have been a Lead Character Artist on several teams, supervising the design, production, and implementation of:

  • Customizable Character Creation Systems, including pipeline and UI/UX design
  • Unique NPC Designs
  • Realistic Costume Design
  • Fantasy and Sci-Fi Armor Systems
  • Weapons (fantasy and sci-fi)
  • Creatures

I have worked with in a broad range of art styles, from hand-painted low poly, to hyper-detailed realistic assets for AAA productions.

Custom stylized Metahuman

Most of my career was spent in service of large open-world RPGs, where a progression of visual character designs is needed to sate the players’ appetite for loot. As a result, I’m very used to thinking about this progression and planning character systems from the beginning of a project to accommodate future expansion, whether it be for IP growth or a live game economy.

Character art has been just one part of my game dev career. Here’s some selected experiences:

  • Interim Art Director | Stealth (2024) – Developed character pipeline for customizable player characters for a unannounced game. Built master layered materials for Outfits, Skin, and Hair in Unreal Engine 5 to satisfy a stylized art direction, and collaborated with the team to ensure the resulting assets would could be efficiently produced and reused in the future.
  • Lead Character Artist | Starfield (2023) – Led the design of Starfield’s robust character creation system. This included the method for integrating a set of 3D scanned faces into a reusable rig for facial animation. Collaborated with the animation team on systems for creature and robot production. Collaborated with the concept art team for the design and creation of large numbers of modular space suits. Collaborated with designers for the design of a modular weapon system and art pipeline. Led the character art team and collaborated with the outsource team on a large outsourcing effort.
  • Senior Character Artist | Fallout 4 (2015) – (Fallout 4 had no Lead Character Artist) – Worked with the new outsourcing team to greatly expand Bethesda’s outsourcing operation and to develop pipelines that would minimize disruption of the internal team. Designed and built several modular enemy sets for the game. Collaborated on key Fallout IP assets, such as the Vault Suit, the Power Armor, Supermutants, the Feral Ghouls, and the Synths.
  • Senior Artist | Skyrim (2011) – Revamped and polished many player armor sets for the main launch. Designed every character for the two large DLCs, and built several characters.
  • Lead Character Artist | Imperator (Cancelled in 2005) – Developed pipelines and built key assets for a new MMORPG
  • Character Artist | Dark Age of Camelot (2004) – Built hand painted creatures for Trials of Atlantis, designed the updated player-character system for Catacombs.
2-hour head sculpt from a sphere for testing Blender

On the technical side of character art production, I have worked with a large variety of software and methodologies in the pursuit of the best pipeline for any given project:

  • 3ds Max, Blender, and Maya as core DCC
  • Zbrush for organic and hard surface, Marvelous Designer for costume, 3dsmax and Blender for hard surface and low-poly.
  • Every baking and material tool under the sun, most often Substance Painter
  • Unreal Engine 4 and 5, many Gamebryo-derived engines (The Creation Engine)

I am also used to working with animation and rigging early in the character pipeline to ensure the concepts being built will be expressive when they are used with animation. I have built rigs and skinning pipelines in Max, Blender, and directly in Unreal Engine 5 using Control Rig.

That’s my Character Art journey to date, at least the parts that have escaped the shroud of NDAs. To see my contributions in other areas, please explore the rest of the site and my Artstation.