Hugh Riley - game artist

 

Management skills:

Scheduling, project planning, art management, creative direction, pitch creation, pipeline design/management, inter-departmental and client liaison, outsourcing, employee review, mentoring, interviewing, software evaluation, costing, documentation, problem anticipation/solving.

Art skills:

3D modeling, texturing and UVmapping, rigging, animation, UI, 2D sprite and character animation, 2D background design, character design, concept art, game design, level design, mocap.
Principal software 3DSMax & Character Studio, Photoshop, Maya, ZBrush, Facegen

Game Employment History

Most recently, Art Director on location in Poland on a short term contract with Zenimax Media, parent company of Bethesda Softworks, re-organising and directing the Art Dept of a third party developer, with a brief to triage and redesign the art on an outsourced project and guarantee timely production and increased quality of scheduled content.

2007 - 2008 Backbone Entertainment Vancouver, BC Canada
Studio Art Director

Supervised asset creation and established the art vision and content for new product. Additional responsibilities included project planning, resource estimation and scheduling, collaboration with internal and external clients, establishment and maintenance of pipeline and tools, content review and approval, and provision of art team mentorship and performance management. Successfully worked closely with all levels of management to allocate and manage resources across games and pitches of varied art styles to ensure the production and integration of AAA quality art in a timely manner. Re-organised Art Department to create collaborative core groups for UI, Concept and Technical Art. Negotiated a substantial reduction in force while keeping morale sufficiently stable to maintain art on 4 projects to schedule with zero subsequent attrition.

2004 - 2007 Bethesda Softworks Rockville, MD USA
Character Lead, Lead Animator

Designed, modeled, textured, rigged and animated creatures for Oblivion and led a team of 10 character artists on Fallout3. Responsible for planning, prototyping and implementing the character pipeline and for scheduling and supervising the production of all assets for characters/creatures, hair, clothing/armor, weapons/projectiles and facegen. Worked with programmers and leads throughout pre-production to design and incorporate new functionality. Ensured that assets were coherent, economical, practical and in line with the game art vision. Brought the mothballed Ascension mocap system back online. Also responsible for planning & supervising asset creation by outsource production houses, for interviewing, training and mentoring artists and for documentation of character creation technique. Lobbied successfully for the adoption of Perforce for asset control and a Wiki for dissemination of knowledge and schedule monitoring.

1999 - 2004 Legend Entertainment Chantilly, VA USA
Lead Animator/Character Lead

Responsible for planning, creating and implementing character animation, creation of character models and supervising the 6 artist animation and character/weapons modeling team to ensure timely delivery of usable assets. Tasks included 3D character/weapon modeling, rigging, animation, skeletal system scripting, scheduling and mocap costing. Worked with programmers to create a unique interface and scripting language to integrate character animation into the game under artist control. Also responsible for training and mentoring new character artists.

1997 - 1999 Bethesda Softworks Rockville, MD USA
Lead Artist/Lead Animator

Duties included character modeling and rigging, texturing, 2D and 3D animation, interface artwork and design. As Lead Animator/Joint Lead Artist on Morrowind pre-production, designed and implemented the character animation system and was responsible for producing and supervising modeling, texturing and animation. Created the pre-production demo. Also responsible for coordination between artists to interpret a coherent vision and anticipate and solve art and design problems.

1996 NMS Software Birmingham, UK
Senior Artist

Created 2D and 3D art on Risk, Battleship, and Mass Destruction\\ (all on PC, Playstation and Saturn) for Hasbro and BMG.

1995 - 1996 Academy Software London, UK
Creative Director/Game Designer

Designed, created and produced an original, innovative, interactive TEFL CD, ‘Wordbird’, on PC and Mac for Simon and Schuster. Responsible for all artwork and creative decisions, working with a small team of programmers, teachers and publishers to design a unique piece of educational software.

1990 - 1995 Keyhole Design Studio Athens, Greece & UK
Artist/Game Designer/Proprietor

While under contract to Probe Software and other Companies, produced games designs, 2D graphics, animation and mapping on a variety of high profile AAA projects across multiple formats (PC, Snes, Megadrive, Amiga, Atari ST, Game Gear, Master System and C64) such as Back To The Future 3, Robocop 3, Teenage Ninja Turtles, Aliens 3, Mortal Kombat 2 and Aladdin. Responsibilities included working directly with freelance and in-house programmers/artists on games and utilities.

1988 - 1990 Vivid Image Ltd Watford, UK
Creative Director/Game Designer

As director and founding partner was responsible for all artwork on Hammerfist and Time Machine on Amiga, Atari ST, C64 and Konix, the design of art utilities and for supervision of other artists on other formats. Was also company secretary in charge of payroll.

1986 - 1988 Keyhole Design Studio Manchester, UK
Artist/Game Designer/Proprietor

While under contract to System3 and others was responsible for some design and all artwork on the best-selling Last Ninja, Last Ninja2, Bangkok Knights, Predator and other games on the C64 and collaborated on several other titles on C64, Amiga and Atari ST.

Education

Nationality