INTRODUCTION

In my nearly four years of development on Fallout 4 I worked primarily on character art and concept art, while also working project-wide on materials, outsourcing, and asset pipelines.

The last thing I did on Fallout 4 was to paint the cover for the Fallout 4 Art Book (click to enlarge images):

I had re-topologized all the power amor meshes for the renders in the book and here I blended a wireframe render with a hand painted take on the materials I authored for the in-game power armor models.

ENEMY DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION

During production there were several key enemies that I was allowed to dig into, with the design and with the assets and implementation. These were enemies that the player encountered hundreds of times during their playthroughs so finding clever ways to create variation through layering of assets was valuable.

The Supermutants were designed by the late, great Adam Adamowitcz, and the base characters were built by Jonah Lobe. I designed armors based on Adam’s sketches and designed the key Supermutant characters Strong and Virgil.

For the Feral Ghouls, we tried to come up with a more. . . . feral . . . take on the classic design. I built the base assets which have continued to enjoy a long life in Fallout 76 to this day.

The Synths were based partly on sketches by Viktor Antonov. I designed them to animate on a human skeleton while still appearing to have mechanical joints. I then built a destructible layered armor system using our robot tech. Players can do damage that destroys layers of armor, rubber skin, and eventually dismembers the mechanical character without killing it. I was able to implement this on my own due to the good work the team had already put in on the robots for the game.

For Nick Valentine, I snuck in a unscheduled day to give him a custom sculpted face. He used the topology from our human customization system so that he could animate and talk to the player.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

I took every chance I could get to help flesh out the world of Fallout 4, including taking graphic design tasks that might have otherwise slipped through the cracks. I even took a turn on early versions of the main logo for the game.

Fallout 4 was a huge game and there was a lot of work done behind the scenes that is not easy to show or explain. I and many others did everything we could to fill the game with as many great ideas as the tools and schedule would allow. It was the project that taught me the most about what a great team can do with a great design and the time to work on it.

THE MECHANIST

My favorite artwork for Fallout 4 came at the end of my time on the project, doing some design work for the DLC just as I had on Skyrim. Here I updated a classic Fallout character – The Mechanist – for the first DLC: Automatron.

This was one of my designs that caught the eye of cosplayers and prop-makers. It’s always a huge joy to see these designs come into the real world after seeing them for so many years through the window of a screen.