Developer Interview - Eric Dogget

Feb 13th, 2008 - 10:24pm 0 Comments

0 stars ( ratings)

ED: My name is Eric Dogget. I’m a technical artist for The Sims Castaway Stories.

SWT: So Eric, what exactly do you do as a Technical Artist for The Sims Stories?

ED: Well I do the work that nobody wants to do. I do skeletons for the objects so they move and so the Sims can interact with them. I handle a lot of the bug fixing so the game comes to the consumer in a more polished state. I do what is called skinning and weighting for the characters like the Jaguar and the Orangutan which we’ll see in the game.

SWT: For those that don’t know, what is a Skeleton? Is it an actual skeleton you run around with?

ED: It is pretty much like a regular skeleton which drives the mesh of the character, so you can see the character move.

SWT: So can you tell me what you do on a daily basis? Is it all skeletons?

ED: I make skeletons and export animations. Every once in a while I do model and texture objects.

SWT: Tell us a little bit about your self. What is your background? How did you make it into the game industry?

ED: I went to Full Cell in Orlando Florida and I got an art degree for computer animation. I looked around for about 6 months and I landed a job at Aspyr in tech support. I moved up into QA. Once the Art department started I interviewed and got the job here.

SWT: What are your key influences in making The Sims Castaway Stories?

ED: My influences? I’d say Cast Away the movie, Lost, Gilligan’s Island, and all the other standards.

SWT: What advice would you give to someone out there who is striving to be a technical artist?

ED: Have a really good demo reel and work really hard.

SWT: What are you playing right now? Do you go home and play the Sims?

ED: Right now I am playing Bioshock.

report abuse