LIVE | Making Weapons for Back 4 Blood with Brad Boyles

[Music] what's up everybody welcome to another episode of game dev unchained the number one game development podcast about game development and the lifestyle thereof i am your host brandon fam and with me a special guest brad boyles how you doing man very good not too bad too bad all right there we go uh this is the part podcast where i asked our guest which is yourself a little bit about yourself you know the past present the future let's do it go for it cool sorry i saw the flies busting around that's your place not mine well it is a new place so uh if you don't mind kind of giving a little bit of background you know yeah yeah totally where are you at

yeah yeah i got into this whole game thing um kind of as a student like uh like a lot of millennials ended up out in orange county uh south orange county for the art institute rest in peace yeah i graduated in 2010 studying game art so you know really into like modeling and environment modeling and stuff like that towards the end of my graduation or as i was graduating i made a lot of really good contacts trying to just you know be that good student go to all the dev hangouts have to have beers with people that will have beers with me and whatnot and that all ended up working out pretty well um i ended up learning about like an intern position not too far in the same area at obsidian entertainment to help out with a lot of just like basic game art janitorial stuff you know super entry level on the fallout new

vegas dlcs it's the last three i didn't work on the first of before but the last three a little bit uh yeah and it was really cool i learned a crap ton it was a sweet like first step in the industry as a little uh intern just doing all kinds of little stuff color tinting trees you know fixing collisions stuff like that and then super super small but fun art tasks um did that for a little while uh another opportunity presented itself after a little bit of time there former former colleagues i mean a former teacher professor slash future colleague ended up his studio over it down in san diego high moon studios was looking for like an entry-level kind of associate junior-y prop person um to do you know some cool sci-fi proppies and maybe even venture out into like weapons

and stuff like that third-person weapons for a transformers game and that was that was where things really really got fun i got to be super creative work off of uh you know actual concept arts made by awesome concept artists and stuff like that little little more outside of the janitorial stuff so yeah that was like a really cool little second second gig um yeah i started just doing props and stuff like that they were happy with my work i was having a really good time so i ended up ended up doing like half or so of all the um third-person guns and props uh transformers was super fun then i was there at the stage when high moon started started getting assimilated into that uh that whole call of duty beast that it is today uh you know a cod studio and everything i worked a little bit on advanced warfare uh and then got the can a good old you

know you can't be a can't be a millennial in the game industry without getting laid off once or twice uh so the layoff was uh you know it is what it is everyone who does this knows what that's like and chances are if you do this you do know what that's like um so that was kind of a shock because it was really cool you know my dream franchise played a played a ton of call of duty in school and stuff like that so to be able to get a little bit of art um shipped in with uh with a cod game was it was a huge step and it was really cool but it was also really sad at the same time because it was just a little bit and i really wanted to to stay and keep booty on that project but you were a full-timer there right or i was i was full-time yeah yeah so i got hired on uh contract worked a little over a year as a contract uh they were happy ended up getting full-time and then worked about full time for a year moved over there after i went full-time lived in san diego for a year and then you know got the layoff

yeah uh well i think that division's a little bit better about that nowadays a little bit a little bit well they're trying to hire as much as they can everyone's leaving on their own yeah yeah looking like it and then eventually you went to turtle rock and that's where we met like i i didn't realize how much we our life were we're in so in sync like you i think you graduated after me we didn't really cross paths while we were a little bit yeah i was a little bit of a baby yeah so and then we were at sledgehammer together at least a little time you were there when i was there that was when i was at high moon so yeah you were at sledgehammer when i was at high moon because you were there at advanced warfare or now yeah advanced warfare and uh cod world war ii that's right a little bit yeah yeah by the time world war ii was happening i was back at obsidian for my second stint there working on russian tank games for four years so you were able to stay in southern california yeah the whole pretty much the whole freaking time um

yeah definitely i'm not too much of like a mover so i was wasn't super wanting to like branch out of here unfortunately you know privileged thing to say i know right not everyone gets to choose that uh i guess oh yeah yeah there was a great chance that if i was asked to go to like you know new york or something like that i would have to say oh i don't know if um this is for me well you waited it out you waited for a panty uh decision and now now you can work anywhere which comes like i i saw that you were your perma remote now you're not even in south california anymore yeah where are you at yeah yeah i am so after being at turtle rock for the last um i think it'll be five years in may um i ended up you know pandemics made everything expensive for everyone of course i got really fortunate didn't have my rent raised on me for for three years and all through the pandemic i had a really cool landlord we were his first tenants but then you know this year he says he can't turn

the lease back up so i'm like all right way too expensive to stay there on an artist's salary so move up to bakersfield california that's where i'm from uh just a few hours north of the la area so yeah just full time here working from home they're really cool with it i'll drive back down every once in a while for you know office get togethers or whatever and yeah hang out some meetings but uh two-hour drive isn't it yeah um getting down to south orange county more like three to three and a half if traffic's good to you yeah bakersfield is uh i've never really stopped by bakersfield it's always been kind of like a fly by city unless you really when i drive up to normal yeah yeah but i mean overall i'm super happy for you man it's um you're one of the best weapon artists i know super humble always positive i love that about you it's it's a nice um energy to be around uh constantly and um

and especially kind of our history kind of crossing path it's always felt uh kind of cool to kind of see your growth and everything and likewise man it's been so cool seeing you and a lot of the upperclassmen at the time you guys are always going to be my upperclassmen you know you guys are always so close to the younger students and everything yeah it is it's crazy i mean i think uh i think overall i think your experience is yeah there are things but you're such a positive guy that you you had fun right but with me you know they were also all um definitely positive negatives mostly negative but like the positive was the networking right with the people yeah but that school in particular pumped out some pretty good talent like that got placed at really high positions now at various companies and so overall it's too bad they couldn't uh hold on a little longer from the scam that they got caught with yeah exactly i think overall like it would have been a great successful campus with all you

know such yourself and many others that we know uh succeeded in the game industry that out of that program um it's unfortunate they kind of closed up shop too soon yeah absolutely we got lucky with a lot of the professors and stuff and the people we met along the line that's what i tell myself i just i paid to go meet the people i met yeah exactly on the side exactly yeah it is um i do want to kind of talk to you about that you know the transition there um you have always been the office guy in office because you lived near enough uh now that you're fully remote has that changed have you always been kind of used to working from home did you kind of do that off and on because of the pandy yeah too because of that yeah definitely like like most studios it was everybody worked from home you know don't even get to for for quite a while um over the last six months or so you know kind of right as things really

started getting better with the pandemic you know less mandates and stuff being enforced and whatnot and the levels of course going way back down um we had a small group go back into the studio and that group kept getting bigger and bigger and whatnot and i was one of the first ones to try to to try to get back in there as well uh when i could because i got a little toddler at home now and my sub a 1 000 square foot condo was uh very hard to work full time with a little toddler screaming around behind you it's as cute and fun as she is um so i i was totally used to it and you know so moving over to to a new place with big space and doors to be able to close the kids yeah it's just it's only gotten better it's only gotten easier uh and then as far as all the logistics for working from home i mean like so many other places there's just been leaps and bounds on getting whole teams up and running digitally and it's it's pretty dang smooth so it's not too shabby not too shabby at

all yeah i do uh i do want to say like um overall and i've been kind of preaching this last two years overall i i want to say that game developers uh in summary have been uh really good working it from home but that has not been the case right um i feel like a lot more people are having a lot of trouble because you know the the stuff they have to deal with at home but um if i have to conclude i i think family guys or gals especially have been a little bit better uh especially people who have done freelancing on the side before uh are kind of used to uh pressure cooking time time as a resource right so they have to be focused and complete work and i feel the younger generation are having a lot more tougher time i would definitely see that and agree with it yeah yeah i was there it was like you saw that all right can you i

just felt the same thing okay i just met like yeah like i feel the same way it was having worked in games for i don't know however long it was six seven eight eight years or something always being in a studio always driving somewhere into the studio and putting myself in that creative mode it was really hard at first to just like wake up and not want to just you know be a lazy millennial or something it's like oh that's right i gotta actually log on and do the same same hard work i've done every day doing during the week and everywhere else and so there's definitely a weird like funk to get through at the beginning i remember but yeah it's just about just getting through it and you know trying to to get out of that and forcing yourself to kind of settle down and not get distracted as often and what not yeah it's definitely a new habit and i'm glad a lot of people are doing it but it is uh i think because of the tech company is kind of starting the trend a lot of people are going back to the office now i i do feel a good amount like over 70 are gonna be back in the

office eventually yeah just the way the companies are say kobet's done quote-unquote right uh get back in here we're paying for these office spaces yeah exactly and then there's going to be a small percentage i mean i think most people are hoping 50 50 but i think it's going to be more than that just logistics and there are a lot of benefits with being around creative gossip right uh just being able to talk in person and uh just based on what i'm hearing not a lot of people are i don't know i feel like mature enough to kind of handle the work from home like i would love to kind of say 100 everybody was efficient but that sounded like more like 20 of people were actually hopeful yeah it's very hopeful to kind of say that way but um you know i i brought you in here because i've been loving your work especially all for all the stuff that you guys been doing for back for blood

uh weapons it sounds like you've kind of had that attraction since the beginning of your career right you did yeah you did a few things but like weapons seems to be your focus uh did you always kind of know this was it something you experiment on one of your jobs where suddenly you're like hey was it a high moon what what when did you particularly hey this is my lane i'm going all the way yeah i mean it definitely clicked at high moon um doing doing the third person robot guns for transformers you know again going going back and working with just some really amazing concept teams um was was another just driving force just having these amazing concepts to work off of and just it worked out really well you know there were plenty of times when like hey i think i'd rather do it this way push these shapes in this direction and they're just like yeah do it just giving me other ideas and it just i really realized that i wanted to focus on just the weapons um but of course you know weapons environments props that was always kind of my thing as

you know graduating um so yeah i would definitely say right around at that time and then to to go to like a tank game after that where you get to make some some really big guns but they're guns that are also vehicles and whatnot um they kind of just further solidified like yeah like these kind of big kind of like you know hero piece prop weapon vehicles are kind of what i certainly enjoy the most so to fall into a first-person shooter like back for blood um as a weapons artist and just getting to do like real guns was kind of just a bit of a dream position so i was i was happy to run with it for the last for the last little while well let's talk about you kind of since armor warfare to to now like how how uh how much of a difference in your process uh changed like of course there's new programs during this from wow i think you were actually uh too young to play with crazy bum what

was your first no i like crazy bump yeah all right so was it running my filters it had to be before advanced warfare right before transformers were you know crazy well what was your texturing software around oh yeah yeah totally no um it was pretty much primarily well it's interesting it's kind of funny so it was photoshopped all throughout school and everything so a lot of these um like weapons you'll see like the the older ones the the rhino and the vector and that 1911 you know that's kind of all just classic photoshoppy finding your metal textures overlaying in photoshop um trying to just nail that pvr stuff all by hand and whatnot and yeah this is this is right before all that stuff um i think it was yeah it was right before all that but then that was definitely the next step so it's so i guess taking a step back on the transformers stuff um

we had we have they still do uh mike brown is an amazing principal artist over there guided me so much through awesome awesome artness um he pretty much wrote his own quixo kind of procedural texturing you know it essentially was the the indo or the the d-do or whatever whatever that qixel suite was that you know textured out of photoshop i was doing that like before quicksole put it out there just based off of the internal stu studios tools so that was a huge step so i didn't have to spend time you know painting all the little scratches on all the edges and stuff like that we just did it procedurally procedurally worked really well for a third-person weapon since you weren't seeing it in super close detail so that really enabled me to just model fake texture like crazy like really really fast um you know lots of symmetrical things on these shapes so i only ever modeled half a gun or whatever half of a thing just mirror it over so it was actually even

though some stuff might kind of look complex um i got it down to where you know most of these assets i think we're done in about a week um so that's that's from like blackout to textured in in-game like hand it off to the animators ready to go um and then and again that week is after kind of fine fine-tuning things so that was after a few weapons um but yeah so you know the whole like photoshopy all by hand manual brunting all through school a little bit of my early career um you know through fallout still like that just regular photoshoppy stuff and then yeah i get into the studio and i find out oh man there's like tools that can texture the stuff procedurally for us that's pretty cool um so then when i end up at obsidian uh it is quick simple like quixote suite that we used um so we use that on a lot of the early tanks um i have a little bit of environment stuff is this one you were were you there when larry was there too i think so yeah i was there during that

i was pretty much there through the entire production of that project like i was heard on very early on yeah uh yeah i was actually hired on as an environment artist um and then put over to the weapons team after i begged and cried a lot how many set of naps uh because i've always been because environment we're always like kind of told to like use as little materials as possible but like with weapons and then to characters it's it seems like every eyeball is like 4096 and i'm looking at his weapon and i always felt like weapons are in between like how many sets of maps yeah yeah i think some of these tanks went pretty crazy like anywhere between seven and ten on uh on some of these vehicles yeah they weren't all 4k um i think the only thing that ever got a 4k map in game was the hull so the big kind of body the big chunk of body but then you know we had we had separate texture sets for

everything else so you had one for barrel you had one for the tank tracks you had one for uh the turret you had one for all the little boxes and stuff like that stuck to it oh yeah definitely i mean it's like that even even on weapons today and stuff like that how much has that increased or has that changed um you know i wouldn't say it's changed too much actually um it's just bigger size like 40 96 81 92 or oh definitely no 8k no that would be nice but uh definitely i've never worked on a project where i was able to put anything bigger than a 4k map i'm sure it's out there but um yeah i mean most of our guns are anywhere between um like two and six texture sets i'd say um for most of the like kind of larger like assault rifles and stuff like that um but if it's smaller yeah i can go down to like two and then are they much to a science now where each map is dedicated to a part of the gun or is it

different for each gun yeah uh it kind of kind of depends on the artist but for the most part yeah we will work the same and we'll definitely you know the front section of the gun the front hand guard and the barrel will always have a chunk of map and you know that my map might be smaller than the iron sights even they're right up in your face and whatnot that we want to have the most detail we're always thinking that classic cod like give all the texture resolution or not all but as much as possible to what's in front of your face and feel free to go lower if you need to save uv space down the line at the front of the game so first person back of the gun most important detail yeah totally okay that's kind of becoming less and less these days because now you know guns are being put in like model viewers yeah and you can even rotate it in game so we kind of step back from that to a degree but that's still always going to be be there overall just make it look good

from all angles look as good as possible at all angles yeah yeah um yeah so i mean like after uh the quixle stuff it was about halfway through my time on the tank team going from that was when painter became like a big thing and i was pretty excited to try it oh dude i think it is oh um the is-7 was my first dive into painter that's the green can i draw on this i don't know it's on the right hand side right here uh keep going right there uh next one yeah that guy that's the is-7 so that was like that was my first soiree into painter um and it was just freaking amazing man i i literally it was pretty cool i got to kind of just take a full week to just dive in to the you know the new program and you know check out all the tutorials painter right off the bat right off the bat i remember they had some great like tips and tutorials and they've always been great about doing that um hopefully it's still that way now that

it's adobe yeah at this point you must have kind of uh experimented with 3d painting programs i forgot what which ones were like i know marie was starting was for the film and effects right and i played with that i was like oh cool potential hair but like it definitely was not for gaming pipeline but there was other programs before that that was promising but you know yeah quixote pixel was doing it i i was doing in quips leading before quicksole i had even toyed around with the photoshop photoshop was always able to take 3d models and paint directly on them but it was bad it was not a a super great experience we're trying to do something like this yeah they kind of slept throughout that uh 3d printing they're like uh photoshop will just take us everywhere eventually they bought substance yeah exactly look at where we're at now but yeah honestly the the jump between from like having to be in photoshop and using photoshop plugins like quicksole to

painter was easily i would say for me personally the biggest thing to happen to me in my pipeline in working in in game art uh other people might feel differently about modeling software as a model i'm kind of behind on that i'm still modeling and max and my i need to check out the the blender and all the get back into the whole cat modeling stuff with the fusion and i did a little bit of that in high school but ever since then it's just been confused but yeah 360. i mean that's huge for you weapon guys especially well anything hard surface i tried playing it but uh i mean i can see the advantage like anybody right if you're proficient at a program you just look awesome doing it eventually and you got to figure out these shortcuts to kind of make your workflow work but uh it was too much like autocad to me it's like it is that's exactly what it's meant for yeah yeah they're they're planning on you at least when the program was built like you're gonna print this out or this is gonna go into a cnc machine and get you know cut from metal like you could make straight

up real guns in these programs and get them printed out that way yeah but yeah but it definitely creates an opening where like hey we can take some of these tools and probably pixel logic is trying to do that with zbrush um they're making a lot of effort but yeah there isn't just uh it's not very uh i don't know gamer focus just yet uh yeah not quite yeah if you do any sort of fusion stuff you've got to have some pretty creative workflow stuff where you're bringing that file into zbrush and making a real high poly out of it yeah it's it's a bother [Laughter] it is a lot yeah that's definitely one of the reasons why i haven't just gone full into it but um i definitely want to look into it yeah blender's looking pretty good though blender seems to the be-all end-all um men want to yeah a little bit of everything and doing it well yeah very cool um so like i do see this a lot too with you weapon

guys right because i feel like um you know zbrush you guys don't touch zbrush as much as i thought you would um so that that's like i think a common misconception where you know of course they made a lot of strides with the hard surfacing model that tink takes through that and they continue to do so with every update it seems like they're really focusing on on making that available but whenever i talk to a weapon guys like no i don't touch that so what's your main reasoning for that what is it just the workflow is so weird uh it's not intuitive just yet yeah i mean i definitely think that reason will be a little different from artists to artists but when it comes to a lot of the definitely like i'm a hard surface gun person and that's mostly what i do which is definitely me and a large group of other artists that get paid to do what we do um you know you just never used a lot of zbrush so while i definitely loved it and enjoyed

learning to sculpt the stuff through in school i never really did much z brushing professionally as as a hard surface artist i never found when i did do stuff you know i never found anything that was going to be like oh man this is so much faster so much better zbrush's menu you know it's definitely a weird ui and program to kind of kind of get into with it being so different than everything else they don't follow any standards that anyone else does of course so i think it's just a little bit of all these other things you know i just since i never was a person that's like okay characters you know creatures organic sculpting this is what i want to do this is what i want to get paid to do all the time in video games when you when you get that you know you're definitely going to get zbrush and you're going to get good at get super efficient at it but that just never really settled with me um i just was you know i was taught kind of a specific hard surface workflow regard you know regardless of what modeling suite you're

in it's that classic kind of you know lay down your constraining edges on your model throw that kind of smooth modifier on there and just do it do it all by hand and get it looking exactly how you want um and that workflow for me has kind of always just prevailed even when i've dived out of it a little bit and looked into other ways or using you know plugins and stuff it's just gonna take my block out model and try to to make it nice and high poly without the added work and steps of laying out down my constraining edges and getting exactly where i want um i mean i'm so comfortable with that i can do that so quickly that's just like second nature that i feel like the hardest part for me in any like asset that i'm doing is always the the block out the very beginning you know nailing these proportions and shapes so that they're pretty close to what they need to be in real life before you even worried about getting the high poly done making sure the edges are all nice and

round and smooth where they need to be and any sort of high quality details are going to get baked down to the normal maps so that always takes me the longest time and then from there it's all just kind of busy work like you know unwrapping and high poly modeling laying down your constrained edges and getting those those curves exactly how you want just kind of become second nature when you've done it enough so yeah i just haven't haven't dived into zbrush because mainly because i just haven't needed to for a big reason um painter has gone so far with what you can do with like just height maps and you know painting height data um you can really fool i feel like a lot of stuff that people would think could only be done um or would normally have yeah only done like sculpting in a high quality and you can do that like all with just height map info and some really amazing uh designer substance designer you get a really good you know texture artist and materials person in there and it's like oh yeah this is all nodes and just

stacking and layering height maps the right way and it's like are you sure that looks like an amazing that would have been an amazing sculpt i want to see your sculpt you're lying it's like no um so yeah no i kind of kind of answered it it no it's a it's the same i share the same sentiment because with props it's the same thing right um i mean in my my career i mostly do world building uh so proportion and and block out is so important to get that mathematically correct and zbrush just just doesn't have that yeah yeah that's another great kind of measure yeah like it's you just got to free space it and then you know only proportion wise you can have it in relation of itself but like how many times we start something z brush and import and then we gotta scale it up a hundred times exactly i was just about to say i get all my scale right at the blockout stage

when it's in max it's gonna be exactly you know i'm going to make sure i get it right in there right before anything so that when that gun ends up in the character's hands it looks like it's the right size and that's so you can do all that so well with kind of just your basic out of the box max and maya yeah it sounds like uh it sounds like blender solves a lot of those issues just being able to yeah all around sculpting and stuff if you have to uh just to bare minimum um so you do a lot of guns uh i'm guessing you are a gun owner as well so what's the deal here like how how how close to reference do you have to be to kind of be like uh to be awesome at your job here um i mean it's it's really tough some most people aren't gonna know how how freaking close we got these guns to like real life you know what i mean yeah

but i think that's part of what helped me get the job they asked me that question in my interview tur rock they're like oh so you're applying for a guns position you like guns right yeah like yeah like you could do you own some guns oh yeah of course i got some guns i like guns this is america yeah so and that actually worked out to my favor they liked that you know not only did i you know enjoy doing the stuff in 3d and stuff like that but this was something i did on the side you know i got to the range when i can and whatnot and i get really into these um a good amount of all these guns in the game are all guns that you can kind of buy in real life now obviously you don't get the fully automatic versions but you know you can buy like legal california like you know civilian versions of these that only shoot you know one round per trigger pull like an ar 15 and whatnot so to have like some of these just you know in my safe and be able to just take them out disassemble and take pictures of any part i need to it was really nice

it definitely helped there's another really cool software out there i guess it's like a game it's called world of guns and it's the same thing yeah i don't know yeah it's just a huge like database um of like these these weapon 3d models and and they're they contract artists out to make them very close and you know as close to real world as possible you can take them apart all in 3d space and whatnot yeah so i mean it was definitely cool to be able to to look at a lot of these and just look right at what i have and be able to to do that but yeah definitely i i definitely would say that if you wanted to uh do this kind of thing um it's gonna work out even better ah there it is yeah world of guns i think i dropped like 50 bucks to own the whole game and all future content oh it's insane any gun that i didn't own pretty much that i wanted to see you super realistic

i don't think they have a vr in integration um watching yeah it's just right in your browser i don't think i mean that'd be pretty cool um but yeah you know so if it's a gun that you've never held in your hand before or maybe it's something a little harder to find decent reference of and you want to know what the bolt looks like on that side when you rack it back and what kind of details you need to have in there for a video game to at least make it pass as like real you know you can kind of hop in this program and check it out amazing resource stand dude oh totally yeah weapons artists uh if you're not going to get into the real thing for for whatever reason at least get world of guns yeah it's a lot of fun yeah i feel like it's so important um i mean it makes sense right the same with characters they're always having those little dolls around their discs [Music] posing their maquettes and everything yeah so yeah oh they do have a gun range then good yeah a little gun range to kind of see how it is and if you were to use that again there's another one oh you were asking

about vr if you want to see some of the most you know some of the most realistic guns you can play with in vr hot dogs horseshoes and hand grenades that's the that's the that's the vrb's knees that's the game it's uh it's kind of like this um only not quite to the mechanical degree where you can disassemble them and see them in these x-ray modes it's more about just picking them up and using them in vr but they're it's almost a sim um they're incredibly realistic if you if you grab an m16 in world of guns and you pick it up and you don't know how a real m16 team works in like in real life you're gonna have to figure it out because if you don't like you know rack the bolt the right way and then you know do this the right way they get the gun's not gonna work so they make it really kind of kind of like that then they also do some flashy [ __ ] like this it's pretty fun silly little uh i don't know why i think where they got

the name hot dog or shoes and hand grenades wow it's catchy that's why it is yeah like most i didn't grow up around guns so at first you're like oh you know um naturally if you don't know what it is growing up you kind of are a little bit hesitant around it but going to gun ranges and feeling the raw power in your hands [Laughter] it's something like i get it oh my god it takes two seconds and it's uh i think the first thing i that was shocking to me is like oh man this [ __ ] is this [ __ ] is [ __ ] loud it's so powerful uh with the kickback it's like uh even growing up even yeah with counter-strike right that's just an idiot going growing up with counter-strike you know with different weapons you feel you know different like the deagle is more powerful than the scout or whatever right and so i grew up thinking like that it's like oh i want the most powerful gun because they'll kill faster it's like now every gun will kill you uh

you don't have to worry about that but pretty much like playing with the the different guns and gun ranges is like oh man this will literally blow you up if it pierces you uh it definitely will hurt more it feels like um but i think it's one of those nice things i think educational-wise that people just need to be around it is a technology that isn't going to go away oh yeah and it's so important to know how to function around them um yeah even at the very least to know how to you know if you don't if you find one you don't want to touch it you don't know how to how to drop that magazine make sure it's safe make sure that you know the gun's not going to go off if someone was dumb enough to pull the trigger without intending to or something like that yeah totally but yeah i mean it's really cool i know even in previous projects um i think it was for sorry my dog in the background hopefully it's not too loud um i forgot what project it was but the

other weapons artists i work with um it might have been for evolve maybe it was something beforehand i don't remember but they uh they got to go hang out with like uh i think it was uh some sort of division of the armed forces um they went and got out to like an army base and they got to shoot kind of the real deal and same thing a lot of people just had the same the same kind of epiphanies like oh man i've never seen any of this stuff like in real life before and been around a gun when it's fired and this is very eye-opening and you know so it's pretty cool when studios will take you to do that take your teams i think they took the audio team out there as well to actually get some some raw sounds recorded so it's always a good opportunity to jump on if you if you have do you have the chance to yeah i think there was a great time period where uh research like that was uh more encouraged i do feel like we're entering

kind of like an era where it's like google google games oh yeah it's less important for sure you can you can literally just get everything you need off the internet to some degree yeah so like to to uh to to i think to a point where it is a problem right we're not vacation scouting uh not vacation location location scouting anymore as much um i mean the internet is a powerful tool it obviously is convenient and uh it's the next best thing if you don't have access to to to those uh uh opportunities but uh i feel like a lot of games now myself included have been mostly relying on internet resources to kind of visually tell the story to i think a detriment man i feel like it feels you can you can tell if it feels fake uh

yeah certain degrees to at least like people who are around guns a lot or and i'm not not saying that you have to shoot zombies or shoot a person to know what it feels like right but of course yeah there are things like you know as an environment artist would be nice to kind of visit these places get the the context the textual um thing that you're trying to convey digitally uh that overall helps you know we have mega scans now we have like photogrammetry you know we don't even go out anymore i mean a lot of bigger studios yeah they have their own team but even then it's like you're kind of leaving it up to your texture team to kind of capture all that data for you right yeah i'm sure that's become even worse with the whole pandemic thing but yeah maybe get a little bit better now but now things are kind of slowing down easing up but uh yeah it's a great point well do you do you yourself see that as you're playing kind of through these games you kind of get a sense of

that knowing kind of if the team went through research and development or oh yeah all the time oh yeah incredibly easily um there's there's even with our game there's a uh there's always gonna be like a crowd of people and they're probably going to be louder than everyone else even if they're a very small minority but you know we strive for um you know good feeling kind of coddish gun play you know because that's that's what a lot of people are going to know and and cod has come a huge you know way in pretty accurately depicting how a lot of guns work even down to stuff like a regular reload versus a tactical reload and what that even means and what that entails most people have no idea what that even means i just said and that's something that we didn't get a chance to incorporate into our game is tactical reloads so essentially like on an ar-15 you know

if you spend the entire mag and you shoot out all 30 bullets out of that magazine um you know the bolt is going to lock back so when you put a new mag in you have to hit a butt to get it to engage again that's a regular reload fully reload well if you've shot that gun and you haven't emptied out every bullet in that magazine the bullet's going to be ready to go so you don't have to take that extra step of pushing that thing so it's all these just these little like nuanced types of things that we didn't get to implement so i mean that's kind of more focusing on the animation side but even down to the modeling side um there's just so many games out there where you know people who kind of know guns look at it be like oh man the proportions of that ak are so whack like that you know that back grip why is it so big or so long it's not how it's supposed to be or whatever but um so yeah i mean there's always going to be kind of crowds that can spot that stuff and that'll pipe up about it but they're usually in the minority just because yeah most people

don't kind of understand because they don't look at these things in quite that much detail what not yeah i i do think that you can feel it though like even with me i'm not around guns that much but there's certain games that just rise above oh i'm sure if it's bad enough yeah yeah and it's a collection of things too like everything's got to at least be good enough somewhere your animations your visual effects of the placement of the visual effects all that stuff the model you know if if something's lacking it can really bring down just maybe the gun play as a whole um so it was it was great though we we had some we had a great weapons team um so pretty pretty stoked with how it all turned out given all the limitations we had the time we had to do it no it looked great man like how um like going we're looking at uh guns right now from back for blood like what was the normal timeline here from uh concept to to finish yeah it's it's kind of hard through

through the main part of production we actually switched things up that worked out really really well in our favor so at the beginning after we got one or two guns modeled and textured which i'm trying to think back to when we actually did it all in one block time and i'm sure some of them ended up taking almost a month or so to get to like the whole pipeline between most of the team and whatnot so but what we ended up doing which was really more beneficial to the team was we just you know building back for blood on the ground up out of the box of you know unreal four with literally nothing we yeah we just had to start from scratch so it's like the big initiative became uh you know tons of good blockouts so not like a proxy where it's just like kind of close you know a fully fledged blockout this is going to be pretty much how the gun's going to sit in your hand in game so what without all the high poly and then all the textures and stuff done

so we we hit that really really hard so it was just spending a week or two depending on the guns some things can get down a lot faster depending on the size and whatnot how much detail is on it but yeah we just hit that really really hard for a long time to get most of the guns that were going to be in the game just blocked out so that everyone else had something to work on the animators had a something pretty close to what was going to be to animate um you know same for effects and just everybody else who would need to touch these um had something to work off of and you know once that was all done uh the weapon art team got to go back to these these nice block outs and and do them do them for real and give them a nice high poly model and get the textures in but at that point everyone else is already doing their stuff so you got to see the game come together a lot at the end um as far as like the guns because we were just looking at these gray models forever more and more gray models more and more grey models and then finally like the last you know however however so much time half a development or less or more or

whatever it was it's just like everything comes together it feels like it comes together really fast but it's you really just seeing a culmination of everyone's work just getting plugged in and put up at the same time and it worked out really really well um i can see us doing it that way more in the future but yeah i mean you did like all the guns bro it's about half it's about half yeah it's a lot good uh yeah we're just a little team man it's two two weapons artists um we didn't outsource much through most of the project until the end um when we were kind of needed really some some big help um so i mean you know you look at like a cod team you look at their guns it's like you know seven eight it's an army you know like seven eight or people just in-house like working on guns and then you've also got you know vehicles teams yeah teams of outsourced like so to try to try to get to that level

and in all aspects with a super tiny team was a really fun challenge um yeah so what were the shortcuts that you had for yourself was the modeling or texturing that texturing yeah texturing was where we made up a lot of time um you know you're kind of you can notice a lot of these guns their their base models it's just a lot of kind of gray metals and and stuff like that so you've got to just reuse a lot of the metals and smart materials and textures that you've already created to just you know you found something you like slap it on the next model you tweak it a little bit maybe change things up and then you just go from there but yeah texturing was really where things started just going fast after we developed the workflow that worked for us and some some materials that worked for us well and stuff like that making these skins you know it's just like okay just paint an american flag and kind of overlay it on the textures you already had so you know i didn't have to like repaint all the scratches and stuff like that when i did this skin it was just kind of paint an american flag delete the edge

wear so that you get some cool grungy stuff shining through and there you go you have a sweet little custom flag skin or whatever so yeah definitely definitely the big time saver there once we got that walkouts never got faster yeah that's great man that's crazy i love this one the health these were funds the legendaries were fun this was the first chance that the weapons team actually got to work um with some concept arts um from from the team so you know they they knew we were going to be working off of guns we already had in the game so it's like what do we what do we do to spice this up a little bit make it look more legendary cut out some teeth give it this cool like old hood ornament type devil man in the back you know wrap some barbed wire you know they explored some concept iterations and so that was that was really fun yeah it looks like you had fun with this one that was definitely that's probably the one i had the most fun but so how often when you're working with other

departments like the rig and the animation like is it collaborative or are you kind of like asked to pretty much uh serve them like like if the rigger comes back and says hey you gotta fix this or else it won't look right or whatever or the animation yeah you know there wasn't there wasn't really a whole ton of that mostly just because since these guns are mostly all based on guns that are real life we kind of just we made them to function how they were going to work in real life admittedly uh some of our animators and stuff weren't super into guns so they had a lot of kind of catching up to do but they were awesome they they asked so many questions all the time it was hey brad and sean can you walk down over here i've got this new reload and i want you guys to see it and tell me what you think about it before i even bother showing it to my lead or anyone else on the team yeah um so there was a lot of that and

and i couldn't have been happier with how it worked out to be honest because they they totally gave a [ __ ] like they didn't want to just throw in whatever they felt was good enough and call it done um they were like okay well we understand and there was a lot of give-and-take there were plenty of times where we're like oh it actually doesn't quite function this way you know so you didn't just whip out your gun at the office it's like see here this is how you take in the magazine um i mean we had some airsoft guns but no the real ones the real ones stayed at home it was fun getting some some like airsoft guns and replicas and stuff for the studio and to bring those over and have those laying around wouldn't wouldn't be a webinars without some nerf guns and some airsoft guns sitting around to play with but um yeah like i went air softening as a kid and uh there was an instance where there was an electrician in one of our group that was uh working on a office so the

office was cleared out and when we showed it was like full on it was like cs office basically from counter-strike right the level yeah yeah and he had these you know i guess they've been doing this for many weekends all these bb guns are bb bullets are on the ground yeah i remember going they even had like a basketball gym uh it's a pretty big office and so it was like six versus six and uh i was hiding up up on the second floor in the basketball court in the custodial closet or something and i just straight up punched a dry wall just to make a hole it was so fun and i love that i love air softening over paintball because of how they are like replicas yes i felt the same way yeah and they could never truly get into cool holding it right um but yeah you know but it is more difficult you have to be very honorable to call yeah

and stuff so that gets frustrating once in a while but yeah stuff like that yeah it's just naturally i think that's kids you kind of naturally like guns but from games at least for me it was from games oh same yeah first person shooters were always easily my favorite class of video games even before i knew i wanted to make video game art for a living or have anything to do with video games for a living it was like yeah these are fun this is what i like i can still remember some of the first shooters that i ever played on pc how much my parents were not cool with that these are the parents to let me shoot at 22 you know when i'm 10 years old but when it comes to to the real deal or you know shooting all the blood and the violence in video games that was where it's like hey no no you're too young for that young boy so i had to do that in secret now get your 22 and shoot in the back all right well when when it comes to uh

you know you've always worked um on both realistic and um fantasy guns um what what is the most important thing to kind of make those sci-fi guns based on reality like because obviously when we look at these games they go too fantastical um where it just feel uh the best way i could describe is weightlessness there's a weightlessness to it when i'm playing like a certain well cert halo games nowadays are better but there were certain guns in halo where i was like all right i'm just playing with a nerf gun at this point yeah was just not like that yeah so what was what's the key thing there where are you can't is it like a balance of 50 of realism uh and another 50 percent of fantasy like what what what is the feel there uh i mean i think it's definitely i feel like a lot of different little things a lot more can just go and anything goes

or a lot more you can get away with when it comes to the fantasy guns like stuff that's in destiny and stuff like that or even transformers um i feel like it a lot of it just relies on just a little bit of everything you know even down to something like the fov of the guns you have in game some games like to have more stretched out fops so the gun you know appears thinner and longer on the screen for whatever reason it's maybe maybe the reason is they want the guns to be less intrusive on the screen so you can see more of the actual gameplay and game stuff that's going around but then the gun feels lighter it feels skinnier and longer and just doesn't feel as heavy and it's good you know we really strived for a more like squat fov to make the guns feel chunkier and heavier in your hand but then you know the animation is going to be a huge part of it you know when they slam that mag in there is his hand gonna kick back a little bit as well to kind of show that that force you know i feel like like holy crap when modern

warfare remake came out in 2019 that was just the epitome of taking video game guns and pushing those anims even a bit past what's super real just make them feel as meaty and heavy and mean and chunky as possible and they just freaking nailed it they really nailed it um a lot of games have strived to try to get to that level and either gotten close or not not quite and whatnot um so i think just little things like that is just they've all got to kind of come together for that to kind of feel right gun plays just everything it's a little bit of everything you know all the way down to the sounds and whatnot um yeah it's hard to just pinpoint it but yeah i think my answer is a little bit of everything no it's it's tough man i it's i think it's the same with environment because i think cod's the only game that i actually had to kind of base things on realism right um but even then i wasn't traveling to

italy or or anything right it was a ghoul it was google art and most of the time that's that's where you're kind of that's how you guys gotta be creative right you're just gonna have to base it on on references as much as possible yeah um and that's why i feel like as a digital artist you know you you weapon guys have less of a concern i feel like um the only time you guys do go crazy is like the sci-fi or different guns but like yeah for environment you know not being in that uh scenario uh just a disa genuinely feeling like a creative artist right it's like i'm making this up from references so i i don't know i guess like for me i've always felt like a kind of poser in that way it doesn't feel authentic it's not because you're you're supposed to be grabbing from experience and expressing it right

that's what a creative is um an expression of the art that you experience but because i'm kind of doing this and because we're a digital artist for entertainment right you know it's all about trying to hit the deadline that uh there's a disconnect uh for this generation of artists uh versus you know the real artists that are actually basing it off of their experiences yeah it's definitely changed and is changing for sure or then you get a crazy design team that wants you to change all the stuff up oh i know i'm trying to make it like the space that forever between art and design it's never going to go away but it's so needed yeah i'm trying to figure that out i've never been able to explain that um it's hard it is hard right because i think out of everybody weapon artists are probably the most uh in tune with their craft because you guys are usually gun owners you guys usually have access

uh for reference like that i feel like it is definitely unacceptable when when you interview a weapon artist like i've never shot a gun in my life it's like all right right um totally and then it becomes less and less important as a character artist as environment artists as i mean that's pretty much it all types of art really even with animation they're able to kind of use themselves as references and they're not kind of making it up on their own but like uh but even weapon animators uh i find that they're kind of referencing other animators oh yes right they're not out there like no i shot this myself so like you guys are definitely in a class of your own um the one thing you guys you know because even vehicle artists they don't have access to any of that either oh yeah man working on tanks was crazy

you don't have tanks in your garages that's impossible so i've always noticed that yeah you guys are definitely a lot more real in terms of at least entertainment artist just just loving that craft and loving that genre uh more than the rest of us so cool it's cool to hear about it from an outside perspective which i don't that's what i've noticed man i'm sitting there you know researching google i look over to you guys you're like cocking your magazines exiting your magazine and [ __ ] see i don't even use the right terminology that's cool you called it a magazine instead of a clip so you're you're okay in my book buddy there we go uh well man uh we are at the top of the hour i'm gonna throw oh my god it went by fast putting the time i love looking your stuff man it's always great to kind of have you and uh and just hearing updates uh overall uh how can the good people find you um

your art station twitter whatever uh this is where i kind of shut up and let you take over yeah i mean i i actually don't do too much i'm on facebook and i'm on our station that's kind of about linkedin um you know you can just search brad boyles and pop up up on north station or probably linkedin radboys art but uh i think my actual cart station portfolio is just the normal brand.oilstation.com uh if you want to check out that stuff but have always loved to have comments and views and critiques and whatever so all right man well thank you as always it's always fun to talk to you likewise see you guys all next week yeah buddy [Music]