Introduction

I’d like to start by thanking everyone at 80 Level for this opportunity! My name is Nick Comeau, and I’m currently an Environment Artist at Raven Software working on Call of Duty. I started at Raven a little over 3 years ago, and have worked on CoD: Modern Warfare Remastered, CoD: WWII and CoD: Black Ops 4 during my time so far. Before coming to Raven, I went to Champlain College in Burlington, VT, and studied Game Art and Animation.

Originally, I was interested in working on animated films. Before college, I hadn’t done digital art of any form. During my time there, my passion for making games grew, so when I had the opportunity to join the team at Raven, on one of my favorite games, I jumped at it.

This project actually started back in college, years ago. My original plan for this environment was to do a much larger part of the house from Howl’s Moving Castle. I had started blocking it out in Maya and getting large shapes but got overwhelmed as I started to get into how many small assets and so I never finished it. When I recently was looking for a new project to work on at home, my wife reminded me that I had this project sitting on the shelf still, so it felt like the perfect thing to start on. My goal starting on this was to scope down to doing just this corner of the room, to make sure I came out with a finished piece, and hopefully not ruin the beautiful art of Studio Ghibli. I wasn’t sure if it was going to turn into something more realistic or if I would lean more into the Ghibli art style.