In 1998 I was the Art Director at Mondo Media on the game Hockey '99 for Spectacular Games Publishing. I directed a team of six artists in creating real-time 3d characters, environments, and 2d interfaces.

I worked with the two engineering teams at ILM and FarSight Technologies to research and implement the art technical constraints, and eventually to fine-tune the art assets in the engine. Unfortunately the game was never published.

I designed and created the model below and its textures, which was then used to represent all the goalies in the NHL. I directed two artists to create the rest of the 28 team uniforms, starting from my initial textures. There were three versions each for the team Home, Away and Special uniform sets, plus the unique helmet designs for the leading goalie on each team.



The model has three levels of detail (LODs), at 600, 300 and 150 triangles each. Careful use of mapping coordinates allowed me to reuse the same texture set for each LOD, which helped save texture memory.

Since the game engine had no real-time lighting, all the lighting had to be painted into the textures, like creases and folds. The goalie's shadow is a collection of six squares with blurry transparent circles on them, each linked to a part of the body but constrained to stay flat on the ground. It's an easy solution, and they blend together nicely to form a diffuse-style shadow.



I designed and created this model and its textures, which was then used to represent all the 30+ arenas in the NHL in order to minimize production costs. I directed two artists in modifying my initial textures to create different color variations on the crowd, center-ice logo, and advertising textures to represent the changing arenas.

The arena features a dynamically-updating scoreboard, alpha-transparent plexiglass boards with animated close-up crowds, animated spotlights for the game intro sequences, and low-res player models for the bench and penalty areas.

The game engine had no real-time lighting, so all the textures had the lighting painted into them.



We secured motion capture sessions with Industrial Light and Magic and NHL players at the San Jose Ice Arena, which I co-directed and helped to organize. Along with another artist on the team, I fine-tuned our motion-capture application process. I then directed animators in applying and editing the motion.

Our motion capture sessions for the game were done entirely on the ice at the San Jose Ice Arena, the practice arena for the Sharks, over the course of two days. We captured over 160 motions with three different characters: NHL players Joe Sacco and Kevin Weekes were the player and goalie while the NHLPA's Mike Ouelette stood in for the referee.

I worked along with the client, our producer, and a senior artist on our team to create an extensive motion tree to plan for the needs of each motion. The client and I ended up directing the motions together, although in hindsight it would have been much easier for the talent if they had had a single director, to keep all the communication straightforward.

Industrial Light and Magic's motion capture unit had never worked on ice before, but they really wanted to use the opportunity to iron out any problems with offsite shooting. We had several problems with the reflective optical capture system, mostly because water tended to obscure the markers so we lost a lot of foot data. They rose to the occasion though and did what they could to clean the motion. However some of the motions we had to keyframe almost entirely.