Archived Rare Life Profile: Artist

by Lerako on Apr 2nd, 2012

Artist: Donkey Kong Country 3, Donkey Kong 64

I came here about 2 years ago and was lucky enough to be asked to work on DKC3 on the SNES. That was such a cool day because then I knew that I hadn’t made a bad choice when I decided to go to work instead of my place at college.

On DKC3 I did background graphics and was responsible for the snow, and waterfall levels as well as five submaps and various other objects. (I also made and animated the scabby looking monkey called ‘Minky’!). Nowadays I’m doing some graphics for the N64. This work mainly consists of rendering textures, making polygonal models, and shading the models before they are sent to our N64s. The trickiest thing to do with polygons is to make them look rounded where they are not rounded… this means careful texturing, texture repeating and polygon shading. We use Alias/Wavefront to make textures – which is the most amazing software that I have ever used. Basically, if you have a good idea in your head, then you can get it onto the screen with Alias. No matter how fantastic or bizarre an idea is, with Alias there will be a way (this does by no means mean an easy way, but a way all the same!)

My favourite aspect of work has to be the lighting of my renders. Good lighting is a very tricky thing to master. There are so many different aspects to consider i.e. shadow casting, shadow colour, light type/radius/ penumbra etc. Something that has helped me a lot in this area is my photography. It has made me consider all the most important aspects of lighting and composition before taking my picture. I find that I use what I’ve learned a lot at work and I feel that it is sometimes good to let my hobbies positively affect my work.

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