3DTotal: Hi Christophe! Now looking at the last update on your site (*cough* almost one year ago *cough*) it says you are working at Naughty Dog and judging by your email address you are still there!
So what’s this company like and how did you find yourself working in the games industry?
Christophe: Hi Tom! Damn, I knew I’d forgotten something; it’s true that I haven’t updated the “news” section on my website for a very long time, but in my defense, I have added a couple of new pictures
over the last 12 months. Quite a few in fact!

Actually I try to manage to get two or three portfolio pieces in every year. As for Naughty Dog, this
company is awesome! We have a great mix of very talented people in the different disciplines required to produce a great game. Also there are not only great artists and games designers, but also a very impressive programming team who push the technology further every day. One of the main differences I have experienced at Naughty Dog, compared to other companies I have experienced in the past, is that the hierarchy is very flat and that we still maintained a beneficial “garage’’ feeling over the years. It’s not too unusual to see an artist walk to a programmer and directly request a tool or a feature that he feels he needs. On the other hand, you could see the environment artist extrapolating on the main idea of the gameplay with the designer without him taking offense, as the main philosophy is teamwork.

Naughty Dog was not my first gig in the game industry; before that I worked for a couple of games companies in Europe, but my main area of occupation was mostly in 3D for video clips, advertising and movies. My last job before coming to Naughty Dog was as a set modeler on the feature film The Ant Bully from DNA productions in Irving, a small city close to Dallas Texas. As the movie wrapped up I unexpectedly became confronted with two options: going back to Europe, Paris or Berlin as I had ties in both cities, or taking an art test as a next gen environment artist at Naughty Dog, passing it, and moving down to work and live close to the beach in sunny Santa Monica.

It was an definitely a hellish couple of days as I was working 16 hours a day, crunching in the compositing department to finish the movie and doing the Naughty Dog art test in the little time left between shifts. Today when I look back at those insane couple of days, I do draw comfort from the fact that I did make the right choice.

3DTotal: Retaining some of that “indy” or “garage” feel by working at Naughty Dog sounds pretty good! How else would you say the USA games industry varies from Europe? For example, here in the UK I have friends at studios who have to work considerable amounts of unpaid overtime, but they do get bonuses if the games sell well and also four weeks of annual leave per year.
Christophe: From my experience, the big difference for me lies in the fact that here at Naughty Dog we have a really flat hierarchy and I can pop my head in any office in search of a solution to any production problem that might arise during my day to day work. This also includes the offices of our two co-presidents, as they are very deeply involved in the productions.

On the other hand, when I worked in Germany, for example, I would probably first have to go to my superior, who would go to his and so on and so on... With the result being that it would take a couple of days to get an answer. Here I can get an answer to a problem or submit an idea on the spot.

Another big difference is the fact that everyone at our studio takes a deep sense of ownership about our games and everyone pulls in the same direction to make sure that each game is the best that Naughty Dog has released to date. Until the next one, of course!

We all work very hard towards the end of a production cycle in order to deliver a great game, and we all put a “little” bit of extra time in here and there on a voluntary basis to make sure that we reach our self imposed goal. And yes we do get rewarded, not only with extra free vacation time, but also in the form of a nice bonus!

As for the difference of vacation time between Europe and the US; I for one definitely prefer to have only three weeks and live in a very sunny place like southern California, where every weekend feel like a vacation, as opposed to getting four weeks of vacation but having to live in a country where it rains a lot ... No, no, don’t look at me like that - I didn’t mean Great Britain  ... how about the north of France? [Laughs].

3DTotal: Your gallery and showreel show you have fantastic all-round skills, but one thing that really blew me away is in your showreel when the vehicle textures are revealed. How did you achieve such amazing metal textures?
Christophe: Thank you! All the vehicle pictures in my showreel and the newest one in the gallery have been rendered with mental ray, either in Softimage XSI or Maya. I don’t really think that I have the key to
any secret when it comes to metal, I just use some judiciously placed reflection cards, sometimes a
HDRI map for the environment reflection, some gradients on the incidence angle for a nice Fresnel effect and some post processing.

Well they certainly make excellent portfolio pieces! And how do you learn techniques like this?
I guess that this is something that comes with experience; I started to use 3D software back in 1991 with good old 3D Studio. Since then, as I have had to learn lots of different pieces of 3D software, I’ve come to realize that most of the techniques are easily transposable from one application to the next. Same theory, different workflow.

But the software aspect aside, I think that it is very important to understand the real world physic that lie behind different materials and how they react to light.