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Bashiok: Hey everyone this is Bashiok your Diablo community manager. Today I’m going to be interviewing Anthony Rivero. He’s our Senior Character Artist on Diablo III. He also worked on Diablo II and the Diablo II expansion as a character artist. Anthony how’s it going?
Anthony: It’s going really good. I got my teeth drilled today but the Novocain has worn off, and I’m ready to go.
Bashiok: [laughs] Excellent. So you actually started at Blizzard; Blizzard was your first game company that you worked for as an artist…
Anthony: Actually no Gravity Incorporated was the first game company, if you could call it that, that I worked at. That was a little start up company in San Francisco, and that was around ’94-’95. They were making a real time 3D game called Banzai Bug, which we actually put out – hit the shelves and everything. Probably sold 5,000 copies but, you know, it was a good experience.
[ 33:25 ]
Bashiok: And when you actually came to Blizzard, how did that come about?
Anthony: I worked at Gravity for a little while and did some other startup stuff on the web, all of them real time 3D related projects. I was getting kind of tired of that, and I wanted to work for a cool game company really. I had applied at a few different places, LucasArts, and some places like that. I saw that Blizzard was looking for people, I saw an ad in Game Developer [Magazine] and so I worked really hard on a new demo reel, because I wanted to impress them. Sent it in and I got a call from Matt Householder, who was the producer at the time.
Bashiok: On Diablo II.
Anthony: On Diablo II, and I came in and interviewed and everything worked out and I got hired, and that was it. That was the beginning.
[ 34:25 ]
Bashiok: When you started working on Diablo II what were your first tasks?
Anthony: Yeah, let me see let me look at my notes. The first thing I worked on I remember asking my boss, “Hey what can I do?”, after being there a few days getting situated, and that was Erich Schaefer at the time. He and Stieg [Hedlund] said they needed some type of flying insect monster for Act 3, so I came up with the mosquito demon. What’s now called the mosquito demon, and that was the very first thing I worked on. It was kind of for a swampy area so I figured that was appropriate, a mosquitoish-type monster, and yeah that was the very first thing I worked on.
Bashiok: Ok and are there any other notable creatures or monsters you worked on for Diablo II specifically?
Anthony: Probably the most notable monster I worked on was Mephisto. Phil Shenk had concepted Mephisto, so I already had something to start with. I modeled and textured him and set up the initial rigging, and then handed that off to Cheeming Boey to animate. I actually helped a little bit with the effects as well, the effects that are at the base of Mephisto. He has like swirling smokey skulls that kind of swirl around the bottom of him as he’s moving around.
Bashiok: You mentioned you did multiple things on that character, and it works a little bit differently now…
Anthony: Yeah things back then were quite different. Most of the time the artist did everything from concept, to getting it you know with effects and everything in the game. So you did your concept stage, your modeling, your texturing, your rigging, and your animation and then effects. You know whatever skill effects you may have needed for the monster or for the character, and then got that in to the game. On some characters we decided ok let’s have one guy animate it, and I’ll model and texture it, and we started to do a little bit of that back then. It was very different from what we do now.
Bashiok: And now it’s a little bit more piecemeal where…
Anthony: Yeah now … you know modern art production [and] pipelines for games are way more specialized. They have to be, it’s just the nature of getting things done. So definitely on our team we have things more broken down, not so much as some companies I hear about, but you know I do modeling and texturing mostly. I do some concept work. I help with effects sometimes if the guys need certain things modeled or textured for their effects. The animators pretty much animate all the time, but they also contribute concepts and stuff like that as well. Like sometimes we just want to brainstorm on new ideas, you know everyone will pitch in on the concept phase. But for the most part things are definitely more specialized; you know we have a team that’s just dedicated to rigging.
Bashiok: And rigging being?
Anthony: Setting up the characters with skeletons and enveloping the characters, and stuff like that. Making sure things are named properly so they export correctly, and all that kind of stuff.
[ 35:23 ]
Bashiok: Going back to your work on Diablo II, you did a little bit of work on Diablo II most of your work was actually on the expansion…
Anthony: Yeah, yeah I guess so. I mean I did some work on Diablo II, Mephisto, mosquito demon, the tentacle that comes out of the water and stuff, and some items that you’ll see in the inventory like Silks of the Victor. Then I moved on to the expansion pack, and we started with a small group of guys. It was myself, Tyler Thompson, Phil Shenk, and I think a couple other guys in the begging. As guys were getting freed from Diablo II they would move over to our team. So on that project I think I started working on the Druid pretty soon, like pretty much at the beginning. We were brainstorming on monsters and stuff like that, and Druid designs, but yeah that’s where I started. That was the first hero I worked on, which was a pretty massive undertaking for an inexperienced guy. Just because of the complexity of dealing with just pre-rendering sprites and then compositing them all together so that they work in every direction and all that kind of jazz.
Bashiok: So on that note would you say that working in 3D is more difficult than working 2D or both have their trade-offs?
Anthony: Oh, 3D is a lot easier. I actually came to Blizzard with no sprite experience; I was working in real time 3D before that. Now that has its inherent difficulties as well but it’s just so much easier to do things like create armor sets for characters and what not, for your heroes, like all that kind of stuff. You don’t have to worry about your data size in terms of you can only render so many sprites and fit them on a disc. You don’t have that limitation. Your limitation is mostly man power, and how much can you get done, and how much texture space do you have and stuff like that. But it’s a lot easier, like you can have … if you want your character or hero to be able to wield 50 different types of swords and 50 different axes and what not, that’s really easy to do. Your only limitation is how fast can you make them.
Bashiok: For the expansion, aside from the Druid, are there any other notable creatures…
Anthony: Well, like his pets, some of his effects, the Death Mauler, and you know I had a lot of management duties on the expansion so I was doing a lot of that as well.
Bashiok: What was your title for the expansion?
Anthony: Lead Character Artist.
Bashiok: And for Diablo II?
Anthony: Just an artist. Just Character Artist.
Bashiok: Working management in a character artist sense, what does that generally entail day to day?
Anthony: You’ll work on some assets but you’ll go around see what otherpeople are working on, give feedback where necessary, scheduling, a lot of meetings, working out issues between disciplines, things like that, communication with the programming team/designers. You know it depends it varies from day to day.
[ 38:39 ]
Bashiok: When you were working on the Diablo II units, what was design and creation process start to finish more or less, and how has that changed for Diablo III?
Anthony: Well the creation process was fairly different, like I said before, a lot of the artists did everything from the ground up. Then there was the sprite rendering part of it, you would have to pre-render your assets, and so basically you’d wait forever for all the stuff to render out, and with the heroes you’d have to render out all of their body parts separately. Things like the gloves and the boots, things that would change on the character. Then you would have to composite those together, for every direction he was rendered in for every frame of animation. So if he’s rendered in sixteen different directions and he has a … whatever, an eight frame animation, well you have to go through all that and composite all those separate elements in the right order for it to look correct on the screen. So you don’t have an arm that’s supposed to be behind the body in front of the body. And… that was a real tedious process.
So thankfully with real time 3D we don’t have to worry about that, and that’s kind of what I was getting at, with things being a lot easier. Also your animation frame count is not an issue any more. We can have nice fluid, smooth animations now whereas before they were really choppy because, you know, we were only given six or seven frames for a walk cycle. You need a lot more than that to make a convincing walk cycle, but you had to make it look its best within the limitations. So the technical part of it was very different, the creation part of it… I think back then things were a bit more tight-knit and collaborative I guess. You know because the team was smaller, you know when you came up with ideas or designs, there was just a lot more back and forth with designers and artists and programmers. It really felt like everybody was more cohesive in that sense, whereas now the department is bigger, there’s more people on the team, it’s more specialized. There still is that collaboration, I mean I can get up and go talk to anybody on the team that I want to, but when they’re way down the hall you start to get lazy and you don’t want to go chit-chat with somebody. You want to get your tasks done. The design process is a little different, but we still, when we come up with an asset now, there’s a particular monster needed for an act for instance, before we really start working on the asset we’ll get together with a designer, a technical artist, character artist, and producer, anybody that needs to be involved and we’ll talk about it and spin ideas around and make sure we can troubleshoot anything we can in the beginning stages. Come up with ideas for how it may die, what else can it do that would be really cool, and we didn’t have that kind of organized meeting when we were working on Diablo II or the expansion pack.
Bashiok: So how would it work, would the artist themselves come up with maybe a function for…
Anthony: It was more… I don’t want to say disorganized, but it was more freeform back then. It was kind of just a natural riffing off each other, and not an official kind of “Hey let’s get together and make sure we’ve discussed everything that needs to be discussed” and sign off on that and move forward. It was just more organic.
Bashiok: I think that’s generally how game design has evolved for most companies. It seems like game design back in ’95 to 2000 was more, I don’t know the game industry itself was a little bit less refined.
Anthony: Yeah definitely, but there was a real charm that came with that too.
[ 41:56 ]
Bashiok: For sure. So as a Senior Character Artist on Diablo III what are your main responsibilities?
Anthony: They’re pretty straight forward. I mean in the beginning of this, I’ve been on this project for a while, and you know I was helping a lot with helping to get art in to the engine in its very early stages. Jason Regier, our Lead Programmer, has been working on this engine for quite some time, so I used to help him get assets in to the game to help him figure some things out. I helped develop the system that we still use, although it’s more refined now, for displaying the armor on the heroes. The various types of armor and things like that. Nowadays pretty straight forward modeling, texturing, some concept work. You know, help other artists if they need help, but most of the guys are kick ass artists and they teach me more than I teach them, so you know that’s changed a lot too.
[ 46:15 ]
Bashiok: Are there any creatures that are announced that we can talk about that you’ve provided some modeling for or have contributed to?
Anthony: The female witch doctor’s heavy armor set, her look is my design and work.
Bashiok: That was seen at WWI, the large feather headdress look.
Anthony: Yes, yes. And the scavenger monster.
Bashiok: Those are the little burrowing dudes.
Anthony: Yeah the little burrowing guys. The Corpulent, the guy that blows himself up, I did some retexturing work on that. Let’s see, the tree that explodes, I helped with some effects work on that. I helped provide some modeling/texturing needs for the effects team. The shaman goatman I built and textured, the other goatmen I did some touch up on, their textures. The ghosts, I created and modeled and textured the ghosts.
Bashiok: From the announcement video the orbs they were spawning out of.
Anthony: Yeah exactly. I think that’s all I can think of right now.
Bashiok: On the website, we plan to have at least, the … pretty much we’re showing a new monster for everybody listening to BlizzCast right now, is the Malformed. I believe you worked on those quite a bit.
Anthony: Yes I did. I modeled and textured those off of Josh Tallman’s initial concept design.
[ 47:20 ]
Bashiok: Yeah we should have some concepts. If you’re listening to this on iTunes go ahead and check out the actual BlizzCast website for that artwork.
I think that about wraps it up. I want to thank Anthony Rivero for talking to us.
Anthony: You’re welcome.
