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Interview with Rodrigue Pralier

Despite a difficult period of unemployment after graduation, Rodrigue landed a dream job creating characters for Bioware 3 years ago and has been lucky enough to work on big name titles like Medal of Honor and the Mass Effect series.

Despite a difficult period of unemployment after graduation, Rodrigue landed a dream job creating characters for Bioware 3 years ago and has been lucky enough to work on big name titles like Medal of Honor and the Mass Effect series.

3dtotal: Hi Rod, thanks for taking the time to chat to us. Can you tell us a little about yourself and your route into the games industry? Did you always know that you wanted to be a 3D artist or was it something that you stumbled into?

Rodrigue: I actually never thought that I would one day be working on video games in 3D.

After finishing a science-orientated high school, I went to an art school because my goal at that time was to make comic books. As a kid I was very shy and spent a lot of time reading comics illustrated by John Byrne, Arthur Adams, Neal Adams, Alan Davis, Jim Lee and many more. I was fascinated by them and wanted to make a career with my drawings.

With time I realized that I was more interested in drawing characters than environments, and in art school I was exposed to so many new and inspiring forms of art (to me) that I started to realize that I didn't want to focus on one thing alone.

When I graduated, I was unemployed for almost a year and a half, trying to get a job in comics or illustration. I spent my time doing small odd jobs here and there to pay the bills.

I finally got a good comic project, but hit a wall with someone from a big publishing company in France who suddenly disliked my work after learning that my inking was done digitally. I was so mad at the time to be confronted by people so narrow-minded and against change that I decided I wouldn't want to waste my life working for such a backward industry. Admittedly, I was young and overreacted to the situation, but ultimately it's what made me continue looking for new job opportunities.

The funny thing is that after months with nothing, I was contacted by a job agency to go for an interview for a night security guard position in a small factory. And I almost went On the day of the interview however, I changed my mind and decided to push for something more art-orientated.

Luckily enough, the next week I found my first job in a small video game company. It was a turning point in my life; not only was I working with friends but I was able to do character concepts, 3D environments, VFX and animation. We were all shouldering the workload of 3 people, but I loved it. I was always learning new things, and trying to achieve better and faster ways to do my work. It was stressful and intense but definitely worth it.

Unfortunately at the same time a lot of video game companies were closing and when I heard that EA was coming to town to find new talent for a studio in Montreal I gave it a shot. My English was terrible and I knew nothing about Montreal but I wanted to continue working in video games and it sounded like the best way to do it at the time. To my surprise I was hired, and so moved to Canada to continue my video game adventures.

I have been part of EAs Bioware Montreal studio since I left France 3 years ago. I can say that after nearly 10 years in the industry, the time spent so far at Bioware Montreal has been the best of my career. I'm surrounded by amazingly friendly, passionate and dedicated people and am given the opportunity to do what I love most: create characters.

3dtotal: Some of our readers will be familiar with the fantastic tutorial series you created for us recently about modeling an elderly man. Do you find it easy to describe your creative process and plan the creation of an image or games character, or do you find that the process you use differs from image to image?

Rodrigue: To me, every picture is a new process and every new character is a new challenge. To this day, I am always a bit stressed at the beginning of a new project.

I always found the first 3 or 4 hours of a new project terribly hard and so used to get really stressed when starting new projects. I actually refused a lot of live demo opportunities because they were only 1 or 2 hours long and I was worried that the audience would think I was a fraud! Since then, I have come to realize that I will always end up with something workable, so those first few hours are a little less stressful now.

At work I don't really have time to think about my process as we have tight deadlines and a lot to do so I just 'do' my work and focus on the technical constraints and checking the piece will work within them. Nowadays I spend more time on the technical side of things: shading, rigging, skinning, rendering tech, pipeline and so on.

In my personal work, I get bored of my creative processes pretty quickly, so I like to test new and different things with any fresh piece I make. Because the constraints are so tough at work, I tend to create more high-res characters that allow me to confront different problems and consider how I might apply them to games.

When starting a new personal project it generally starts from a feeling. I rarely have something precise in mind and tend to just go with the flow. In the case of the old man blowing smoke, I knew I wanted to do an old rock-and-roll character with grey hair, a funny mouth shape and a very white and bright lighting. All the rest came naturally as I was sculpting and researching references.

I'm the kind of person that likes to dive straight in and try to figure out things as I do them, rather than simply wasting time procrastinating.

3dtotal: Can you tell us a little about the process you use to create game characters and are there any programs, plug-ins or render packages you would particularly recommend at the moment?

Rodrigue: To me, only the final result in the game counts, so I dont really mind which tools are used to get there.

Personally, Im a big fan of ZBrush and 3ds Max to create my high-res mesh and UV work. I also use xNormal a lot for my projections (its so fast!), and CrazyBump to help me with the texturing phase. For faces, I still use ZAppLink heavily and the rest is just experience learned through repeating certain processes. I try to go inside the engine as fast as possible so all the rest of the work is simply tweaking in Photoshop.

Im actually very old-school (Im one of those dinosaurs now!) and I dont really use anything fancy. I used to be up to date with all the new iterations of ZBrush but since I started focusing more on in-game work, I have to admit that I probably know only 30% of the latest version of ZBrush.

I was looking at some tools like Marvelous Designer, nDo, dDo, TurboSmooth Pro etc and they all seem amazing, but I havent really taken the time to learn how to use them properly.

With the advent of the new generations of consoles, I think we have to constantly redevelop and evolve our work to keep up with the demands of the players. For me, thats great because I might start to feel too comfortable in my work, and thats the worst thing that could happen to an artist.

3dtotal: On your site there is an impressive list of games that you have worked on including Mass Effect 2 and 3 and Medal of Honor. Can you tell us about your involvement with these games and what it is like working on huge mainstream titles?

Rodrigue: I arrived near the end of game-making process for Mass Effect 2 and so didnt contribute much towards the main game; however I did work heavily on all the Mass Effect 2 DLCs. I was lead character artist for Army of Two, and the character art director on the Army of Two sequel.

On Medal of Honor I was an environment artist and also worked on the marketing pieces.

Mass Effect 3 is my most recent work, and the most exciting to date. I was lead character artist for this project and my main job was to keep improving the pipeline, propose ideas and new designs, all while trying to keep everything together, which was quite a challenge with a game with so many assets.

The art direction of Mass Effect is amazing and the people who created the brand really knew what they were doing. It was great to work with such amazing artists and visionaries. I was lucky enough to be able to bring new things to the characters to make them a bit more realistic and grounded (if thats even possible for a sci-fi game!)

I re-created most of the shaders for the game characters to improve the quality, changed things in the pipeline and managed to get the character team to deliver almost 3 times the amount of assets expected from us.

I also strove to improve communication within the different departments and worked on marketing products such as: cover art, litho, promo pictures, guns and props. I cant go into details for NDA reasons but it was both exciting and very demanding to work on such a big game. Also its the first time that I was working on one of my all-time favorite games so it definitely motivated me to push as much as I could.

3dtotal: As someone who sits at a computer screen all day, I find it really important to make sure I get outside and make the most of time away from work. What do you like to do in your free time when you get a chance to refresh the batteries?

Rodrigue: I used to go to the gym a lot and do more activities but I had a bad back injury 4 years ago and since then I became a bit lazy! I still love to go outside though. I live near a small park and love to walk through it when times are difficult.

Once or twice a year I try to travel outside the country to refresh my eye and my mind. This summer I had a break of 6 weeks so I traveled back to France to see my family. I had almost no computer interaction and it felt amazing to recharge my batteries.

Otherwise I still love to read comics, collect toys (mostly Dragon Ball), watch TV shows, go out for a drink with my friends, play ping pong with my co-workers, eat healthily. For the most part, like my art, I try to go with the way I feel in the moment.

Related links

Find out more about Rodrigue on his website
Rodrigue works for Bioware
Rodrigue was lead character artist on Mass Effect 3
Digital Art Masters: Volume 8

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