Asset Direction

I’m intentionally linking directly to YouTube videos in this section so it’s clear that none of the footage has been doctored. Everything was captured independently, which gives you a chance to see both the highlights and a few of the rough edges.

Each video focuses on an asset family from The Outer Worlds 2 where I was directly responsible for asset direction, feedback, and quality control.

Final decisions were always deferred to our Art Director, but we had a very senior team and were given a lot of freedom to take ownership of the final 3D forms. As long as we stayed true to the spirit of the art direction and concept work, we were trusted to find the best way to bring the assets to life.

If you count all the faction color variants, the final total came in at nearly 320 armor sets. They were created by our internal character artists and outsourcing partners, along with upscaled armor from The Outer Worlds to maintain continuity and kitbashed variations built from existing sets.

To keep everything visually consistent, we built and maintained a system that leveraged Unreal Engine 5’s shader tools to unify materials and textures regardless of where an asset came from. The system was developed and driven entirely by the character and weapons art teams.

What isn’t shown in the video is that each weapon also supports between one and five mods. These modifications were highly specialized to the individual weapon, with the barrel and blade mods in particular capable of drastically changing its overall look. I worked closely with the 3D weapons artists to help shape the visual direction of those modifications.

The weapons also used the same shader system as the armor, giving us complete material continuity across both systems.

The companions were all built in-house and had to be to a very specific specification for the upgrade system that shipped with The Outer Worlds 2. I constantly pushed myself, and the other 3d character artists on the team to push the visual bar for an Obsidian RPG and I believe we hit that bar.

The weapons can be seen in third person in this video which matches up nicely with the weapons video above.

Some of the creatures were developed in-house as well as some created by outsourcing partners. I can also claim that I built the creatures shader and maintained it through out the project.