Tabula Rasa Team Q&A #2

RPGVault continues its week of Tabula Rasa articles with its second Team Q&A, this time hearing out art team members John Mueller, James “Mesty” Mestemaker, Geoff Taylor, Jorma Auburn, Chip Patterson and Erik Ehoff. Also includes seven exclusive images.

Jonric: Looking at the work done by your colleagues on the overall art team, what are one or two things you regard as especially noteworthy?

Geoff Taylor
User Interface / Video Effects / Senior Artist
It’s difficult to answer this question since every artist on the team is extremely talented, and it shows throughout the game. The concept art is phenomenal, and the environment artists did an amazing job. A huge amount of effort went into creating new worlds that immersed the player into the storyline, and the artists involved did a great job. Taking a good screenshot is effortless.

Jorma Auburn
Lead Animator
The entire Tabula Rasa development team is a very talented, inspiring group of individuals. The animation artists work closely with the concept and FX teams. The former group establishes the look of the creatures and the latter adds all the glowing flare, natural elements, and explosions on top of our motions. The concept guys created a large variety of creatures from ambient insects to mutant multi-appendage, snake-like monsters. They added fine details that really defined the characters such as tentacles or little insect limbs.

Once the animation was complete, the animator would send it over to the FX team who gave it the final treatment. The FX artists are part MacGyver and part mad scientist. Considering they only have a small toolset, they are able to produce highly cinematic, realistic FX that really set the mood for our sci-fi world. These departments augmented the final game animations to help them to look as polished as they do.