WORK HISTORY

I am currently working at Insomniac Games, located in Burbank, California. I am a lighting artist, and am currently working on our title, Resistance: Fall of Man. I work with the programmers to help develop our engine lighting tools, and also work with Maya, Photoshop, and anything else I can get my grubby little hands on.

Visit Insomniac Games here.

For over ten years I worked at Westwood as a 3D artist. I spent most of my time in the cinematic department, but also worked on Westwood's most recent RTS as lead artist for "world art" which included terrain, buildings, and world objects, as well as lighting and textures.

For the cinematic work, my duties included creation of high-polygon models, texturing, lighting, animation, special effects and compositing. I also spent many hours babysitting the rendering farm, making sure assets were rendered on schedule.

For the ingame world art, duties included modeling low-poly models, texturing, lighting, and working with the game editor for placement and organization of all assets.

I was a lead CG artist on many of the projects I worked on, and helped define the look of both our games and in-game movies. My previous experience in lighting and photography helped as we began to do our live-action video shoots as well. I designed and oversaw the construction of our sound stage/blue screen studio, and installed the lighting grid and Kino-flo blue screen lighting.

I also started the Westwood image (texture) library, and regularly added to, updated and organized over 30 gigabytes of textures for the art department. Many of my own photographs were added to the library as well, including machinery, military vehicles, and aerial helicopter photography.

Software Used: Maya, Lightwave, Digital Fusion, Photoshop, Alienbrain.

The guys at Moby Games have done a better job of tracking the titles I've worked on than I ever did! See the titles I've worked on here.

Read an interview I did with GameSpy here.

Seth. Just Seth.

SetSource was my own set design and construction company.

I worked in the car photography studios in Detroit, as well as working on film, video, and still photography sets in Hollywood. I painted background murals, made props, and designed and built full room sets using standard wall flats and stretched canvas techniques as well.Clients included Cadillac, Tokyo Disney Resort, Chevrolet, AT&T, Gallo Wine Company, KFC, Ford, Showtime Networks, FTD, Whirlpool, GM, Merillat, Dodge, MCI and Pirelli.

I also built the sets for the Tim Allen Showtime Specials.

I received my Associate's Degree in Specialized Technology at Antonelli's. It was here I learned lighting, composition, cameras and lenses, darkroom work, film processing and all the basics. Having that experience helped quite a bit when I first started working in the studios in Detroit and L. A.

While attending, I won an international award in a student competition for black and white photography, which was probably the first time I thought to myself, "Hey, maybe I could actually make a living doing this stuff!"

You can learn more about the Antonelli Institute here.

Okay, here's the part where I ramble on endlessly about myself. What fun for you!

Actually, I'll try to keep this relatively brief.

Like lots of kids, I sketched and painted a fair amount while growing up. I started painting when I was about 15 years old, and sold my first crude attempts for about $20.00 each. Acrylics on canvas, rainbow waterfalls, sunsets, etc. Although I enjoyed the process of painting, I was often disappointed by the results. I wanted to paint things that looked real. Although I like impressionism and modern art, I don't want to DO them. I like to do realism.

It was not long before I started to get interested in photography. My dad had always been interested as well, and he bought my first camera, a twin lens reflex Rolleicord. I ended up going to photography school, and enjoyed the process of photography as well. But there was a problem. The realism was there, but it was really difficult to do convincing special effects. Multiple exposures in the darkroom meant tedious repositioning of the printing easel and enlarger head, refocusing for each, burning and dodging, etc. The results were ok, but I still felt constrained by the medium.

A few years after graduating, I saw some artwork that had been done with an airbrush. I bought a little cheapie model and tried it out...and was hooked. It allowed me to recreate the subtle blending and gradations that had been so difficult for me in traditional painting. At this point I started combining photography and airbrushing, using the lighting and the realism from my photographs in combination with the freedom of painting to combine images in a way that had been so difficult in photography.

I started doing some book and magazine covers, and had also started sculpting clay models to photograph to use in the final paintings. But now the limitation was what I was able to sculpt, and the time it was starting to take to finish the whole process. I kept hoping there would be some way to combine all these things in a more cohesive process.

Then one day I was walking past a computer store and saw a monitor with some pretty amazing images. It was an Amiga, and I bought one soon after. While creating my first crude images on a computer, I loved the process and the control, but the hardware still had some serious limitations. A limited amount of colors that could be used, very limited resolutions, but there was still hope that the hardware and software would improve.

One day in 1992 while reading news bulletins on a BBS (remember kids, there was no internet as we know it back then) I saw a classified ad that said a company called Westwood Studios was looking for computer artists. I applied, and got the job, and the rest is history. For ten years I ate, drank, and slept computer graphics. Not long after I started, 3D graphics became available on home computers, and I loved it.

With 3D computer graphics, I at last can combine all of my previous interests: painting, sculpting, lighting, photography all wrapped up into one. I plan on doing 3D for many years to come, and can't wait to see what new technical advances are waiting around the corner for us.

Westwood was a blast, and I learned an amazing amount from a lot of talented people. But in March 2003, Westwood closed their doors.

I am currently employed at Insomniac Games where I am a lighting artist.

If you want to see me blather endlessly about life, check out my blog at ericgooch.com .

-Eric Gooch