PAC-MAN

Art Direction & Technical Management

Creative Vision & Style Development

The launch features 10 unique characters as part of the new PAC-MAN Collection.
Focus: Led the visual development process from initial concept to final execution, ensuring the new assets were faithful to the core IP while meeting modern aesthetic and performance standards.

Low Poly Asset Creation

Polygon Budget Management: Assets were optimized and created to meet performance targets for the PAC-MAN Collection: character body was around 15,000 polygons (with accessories capped at 18,000 polygons), and all geometry and accessories were efficiently bundled onto a single 1K PNG texture atlas to ensure minimal draw calls and maximized rendering performance.

Texture Baking Workflow: Specialized in Normal and Ambient Occlusion (AO) map baking in Substance Painter to "fake" high-resolution details, ensuring the 3D model looks high-fidelity even with a low-poly count.

glTF 2.0 Export Strategy: Configured custom export settings to include embedded textures and animations, resulting in a .glb file size under 5MB for instant loading.

Cross-Platform Delivery: Expertly managed the conversion pipeline from glTF/glb to USDZ using Reality Converter and Xcode, ensuring visual parity across Android (Web) and iOS (ARKit) platforms.

Shader Troubleshooting: Resolved critical PBR shading discrepancies between formats, such as transparency sorting and metalness intensity, to maintain brand consistency for PAC-MAN IPs.

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External Artist Management & Quality Control

Bridged creative vision with technical execution, ensuring seamless asset integration from concept to game engine.

Technical Specifications: Authored detailed asset authoring guidelines and technical specifications for outsourcing partners. This ensured final assets were low-poly, correctly rigged, and fully engine-compatible.

Production Pipeline Management: Established a review framework involving daily progress audits and granular feedback loops. Streamlined the brand approval process, ensuring complex 3D assets moved from conceptualization to final deployment without bottlenecking the dev pipeline.

File Testing and Performance Optimization: Directly tested all incoming files for quality and technical specifications. Ensured in-engine and web performance by verifying assets were optimized (file size, low-poly, correct draw calls, etc.) and free of performance-impacting issues.

Technical Challenge

The core challenge involved navigating the complexities of parallel production while managing multiple, critical dependencies (internal, external, and brand).

Specifically, this required:

Simultaneous Asset Tracking: Maintaining detailed progress and quality control (model/animation fidelity) for 10 unique characters being produced concurrently.

Dependency Management: Tracking the output of outsourcing artists (5 characters) and internal contributions (5 characters, where I acted as a hands-on artist) against the timely response and feedback cycles required from the brand stakeholders.