Introduction

I’m from Bulgaria, currently living in Sweden. I have been dealing with computers and drawing for as long as I can remember – from the Apple II drawing and animation programs in the 80’s; Topaz 3D, 3D Studio, PhotoStyler, CorelDraw, and so on in the early 90’s, to the fancy tools we have nowadays. My educational background is in animation direction. Before starting in the game industry, I worked as a graphic designer.

My first job in the game industry was in 2001, when I joined an indie startup to work on the RTS PC game Knights of Honor, a macro strategy game set in medieval times. After that I became the studio art director and we made the game WorldShift, a sci-fi tactical RPG/RTS title. After its release we got acquired by Crytek to work on a big ambitious project, which was never announced. In 2011 I left the company to look for new challenges and joined another small team to work on first person shooter games for iOS.

We called the studio Scattered Entertainment (after our distributed and flat model of working) and released The Drowning and Isolani. After spending almost 3 years there, I pitched the Blacksmith short film to Unity and, after it was Greenlit, joined the team.

SIGGRAPH Presentation

My talk in Siggraph was about a pipeline for creating procedural environmental assets, with mostly automated steps. That was the workflow we used for our cliffs in The Blacksmith film, which was used to demo Unity 5’s new graphic capabilities, mostly focusing on the new realtime GI lighting system and the physically based materials.

The talk focused on the pipeline we built – using Terragen to generate the high poly models, fix the meshes and optimize them automatically in Meshlab and zBrush and unwrap the low polies, project normal and AO textures in xNormal, make the rest of the textures in Quixel dDo, add texture details in Substance Painter. There was also a section about making a reusable set of textures that allowed for easily creating a variety of backdrop objects, using displacement and a small tool to project vertex normals.

Here you can find the detailed SIGGRAPH talk with screenshots and notes. And this is a detailed post in Unity Blog about The Blacksmith production.

Procedural Graphics in Games