Meet the Team — Jói

Jóhann Reynisson, or Jói for his friends, is the Technical Art Lead of Civitas — a force of nature that brings artistic concepts and lines of code together to deliver you the final high-quality assets for your playable tokens. This article is a companion transcript to the original video interview, which you will find at the bottom of the page.

— Giorgio ‘Error 404’ Crosali

The NFTs wouldn’t become reality without some procedural awesomeness. We have the technical artist lead here with us, Jói. Can we start off by getting a little introduction of who’s Jói?

Jói is someone who’s been doing this for well over 20 years now. That’s computer graphics in one form or another, and it has been so long that it was barely a thing back then. Started out in ’98 working in television and then in the film industry doing computer graphics, which eventually led to a job in the games industry. One quick stop at Lazy Town doing television production there before fully joining the computer games industry in 2007. The job is quite technical, it kind of evolved slowly into a technical position to a technical artist, and now technical art lead at Directive Games, leading a team of veterans and fresh young talents alike.

We have a very strong procedure workflow for CIVITAS. Can you explain that to our community?

In short, we are attempting to utilize the least amount of assets for as much variety and visual fidelity as possible. Our main goal is, of course, striving to execute the vision of the art director in the art direction of the game.

Get as close to that as possible. But of course as efficiently and as cheaply as possible. Houdini, the software we’re using is such a versatile tool. If you can think of it, you can probably do it in Houdini.

We’ve been utilizing the kind of point system. Essentially even if it’s a water simulation or whatever it is, it’s a whole bunch of points with certain behaviors. We are creating a lot of rules about assembling buildings and characters from the least amount of assets as possible, but we still want to remain full in full control, both in Houdini and in Unreal engine over the visual fatality and variation.

We’re bringing a lot of new things to the market here. What’s your take on that?

Modular characters in the way we’re building or even modular buildings. These are things that have been done before but bringing it all together in the way that we’re doing it.

For example with the art direction, you can imagine Ásgeir having the challenge of “it needs to be everything”. It needs to be cyber-punk. It needs to be ancient cultures. It needs to be a futuristic building. It needs to be a grass hut or straw hut. So having that challenge in unifying that it’s, it’s essentially about what we’re assembling and in the way that we’re assembling it and building it in web3 just makes it all the more exciting.

Can you tell us more about the unique style of the game?

I worked with Ásgeir before on EVE online. So that’s the dark and gritty world with spaceships over to this, a very colorful, highly stylized art style, and translating that from a 2d concept art, into a highly stylized 3d asset that still retains that 2d feel has been quite a challenge, but it’s still also what makes it really fun and exciting to work on.

We see a 2d straw house being drawn in Concept Art, sometime later we see it as a 3d object on your computer. How does that happen?

By magic! No Houdini! No, certainly that’s a lot of hard work. From the concept stage over to having discussions, thankfully I’m having discussions with Ásgeir along the lines of “is it feasible?” “What can we do?” Then we have a team of artists that create the assets. We keep it in check, moving it over back to the engine, into the stylized look. That’s a back and forth, figuring out how to best execute that vision over into 3d.

But even when it comes to the characters, there are so many steps along the way. You have, let’s say just a necklace, a necklace for one character. It’s drawn. It’s concepted. It goes into a reference sheet that needs to be handed over to the artist.

The artist creates it, keeping in mind that it needs to be animated. Then it gets handed back to us and over to the animators and the skeleton is skinned. It needs to be rigged and then animated. It’s quite the process. And that’s for one necklace as a part of an assembly of assets.

We witnessed firsthand the pipeline here, the way that things move from the concept art team over to the technical art team. And, the pipeline has shown us that there’s just much work that’s going into each of these kinds of NFTs. Have you seen a project utilize it this way?

Can’t say I’ve seen that done before and the rabbit hole goes deep. Once you start, it’s tweaking colors. It’s tweaking assets. It’s making sure everything lines up correctly. There are a million little things that have to go right. But we’re working very hard to make it all happen.

Want to know more of the Civitas team? Check our previous Meet the Team issues on our publication page: https://medium.com/playcivitas/tagged/meet-the-team