Chad Hoynacki — Art Leadership and Management

I joined Liquid Development in 2004 as an Cinematic Environment Artist. I quickly took on many different roles including Prop Artist, Map Artist and Art Manager. It was a fantastic, fast paced learning environment with ever changing demands and a huge variety of art styles to master.

As our team was comprised of global talent, I learned firsthand the value of communication and proper documentation. I wrote many tutorials and provided feedback on an almost daily bases. I also traveled to several of our client studios to learn exactly what they expected and formed great working relationships.

The clients included Bioware, GearBox, EA and Microsoft among others. I worked with many proprietary game engines as well as off the shelf engines such as Unreal Engine 3, just released at that time, and learned quickly the ins and outs of content production for all of them.

Warhawk was to be a launch title for the soon to be released PS3 from the studio behind the Twisted Metal series, Incognito Studios. The original Warhawk was a classic 3d flying shooter for PS1, but this new version was to feature flying and ground combat in and out of vehicles.

My initial duties were to create the detailed environments for the single player cutscenes. This included several command bridges and a large throne room. I was also tasked with creating several gameplay sections for the single player to progress through, such as a sewer system and command ship rooms. This was a fantastic opportunity to utilize my creativity and grow as an artist as the designs were very loose and I was able to suggest and create many options.

Regrettably, after little over a year of producing content, the single player portion of the game was dropped and it became a multi-player only project. The team was refocused into creating several of the multi-player maps for post launch DLC. This included my recreating a huge heli carrier seen in the original game trailer prior to launch.

During some downtime in the production of Warhawk, I was asked to take over some asset creation for the EA RPG title The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth. I took over the creation of several iconic props for the Lothlorien environment. This included the Main House in the center of the map and several of the statues and other props.

It was a great challenge to produce the quality the franchise needed, within very limited technical budgets due to the large number of player assets on the screen at once. The Main House had a technical budget of only 5k polygons and one texture set.

My next project was Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins for XBOX 360, PS3 and PC. I was tasked with creating many of the props that littered the game environments. Everything from bookcases and furniture to wood carving and torture devices. Again, with a limited technical budget, I got very good at getting the normal maps to push more and more of the details.

The team went through a lot of different color treatments and material changes to match the look the client was striving for. Several assets also required tint masks to allow for broader collection changes in the game.

After creating several guitars for Harmonix Guitar HERO II, we were asked to help with their next franchise, ROCK BAND for XBOX 360 and PS3. The game would redefine the music game genre by offering multi-instrument gameplay. Guitars, drums and microphones could be used to try and match the 58 included songs, or the over 2,000 downloadable songs.

For ROCK BAND, we were given full access to the Fender guitar library, and I was to create most all of the Stratocaster line of guitars. Each guitar would have specific customization options that required four to five material and texture sets. I also created several other unique lines of guitars as well as several speakers and audio equipment. For ROCK BAND 2 I was able to move away from guitars, and created several drum sets instead.

We worked directly in Harmonix proprietary Milo game engine and were able to deliver assets that could be put directly into the game.

James Cameron's 1986 classic ALIENS is one of my all time favorite movies, so I jumped at the chance to work on the Gearbox Software title ALIENS: Colonial Marines. Adding the fact we would be working in the Unreal 3 engine, something I had been watching other teams utilize but not gotten too far into at the time myself.

I began making various parts of the ship interiors and props for the LV-426 colony. My experience with limited polygon budgets came in handy as I was able to find way to add details, without raising the polygon counts.

As has been widely known, the project was put on hold for a number of years before being handed to another studio to complete. The final released game bears little resemblance to the project we began.

My first project as Art Manager was the DIRTY HARRY video game. I traveled to The Collective studio to learn their proprietary Slayer engine and review the needs of the project. I quickly setup art tests, began recruiting artists, prepared documentation with tutorials, and setup our delivery schedules. Since the assets were built in engine, there were a number of additional material types we were able to utilize including height maps and BRDF maps.

As Art Manager, I did not create as much content, but instead reviewed, gave feedback, and submitted all assets for final approval. Although I gave a lot of feedback regarding technical specifics, a surprising amount of feedback involved trying to hit the proper style of the 70's. Everything from cars to televisions were much different than what most of the artists had ever experienced.

Unfortunately due to circumstances outside of our control, the project was terminated after several deliveries. Unseen64 did a great investigative report on the history of the project, including a lot of art samples.