Delphine Doreau, Art Director

Music from #Uppbeat https://uppbeat.io/t/cruen/we-got-this

At this point in my career, I find that an article about my work as an artist and art director is more explanatory than showing a bunch of pictures and videos without explanations:

Look development for feature Movies

From the skull texture I created in just one day in 1998 or Sergeant Turley’s look dev that took extended research over a month (Rango, 2010), to the accurate depiction of conjunctivitis and perfectly derelict outfit, inspired by ancient uniforms unearthed after a century, I always took Look Development extremely seriously, looking for references and creative tech solutions.

I have my own style when creating personal art, but my true talent lies in reproducing and adapting to any style, and finding the tech tools to do it. I joke that I can deduce a world from a fork, but I’m only half kidding.

Next: This clip is Transformers: Dark Of The Moon (2011) Intro Title, special effects made at ILM. I created the look development and textures, ranging from the scenery to the inside of the Sentinel's eye. That’s thousands of painted textures, an overwhelming amount that was only possible through innovative techniques like the use of Photoshop actions, baking textures, digital brush creation, and research.

For the Transformer projects, I invented new techniques to make displacement edging on metals, brushes for dirt, and wrote scripts to pre-texture vehicles that I shared with the team so we could tackle characters and vehicles that had thousands of objects per model.

Digital GROOMING (hair and fur) and Leather

Thanks to academic art training, I’m comfortable with all kinds of materials, but hair, skin, and leather are a specific challenge. Rango (full CG ILM 2011) directed by Gore Verbinski, has a very specific, grunge style that required exaggerated realistic textures and materials. I worked on some of the Posse characters, all the bats, and all the javelinas, something like 80 characters, and part of the decor, testing new software to grow fur and view paint details.
RANGO won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

I worked on several feature movie projects in Europe and the United States, including:

Catwoman (2004) directed by Pitoff, CG scenery lookdev.
This is one of the first projects I worked on, City of Lost Children, directed by Caro& Jeunet, 1994: on this CG scenery lookdev, TD, models, Flint. For the morphing scene, I had to figure out photogrammetry techniques as it didn’t even exist at the time. It taught that anamorphosis is just one kind of perspective

Art Direction : Style Guides and Bibles

I worked at EA games and for several other AAA companies, first on textures and lookdev, then working on several Style Guides (bibles) for different projects, including set designs and character designs.
I study biology, botany, history of daily life, fashion, anthropology, and colour history in my spare time, so building tangible worlds in CG is actually my favourite part of the job! Sometimes, just one detail can make a whole scene real and tangible, and I love this feeling.

This is an Interactive Style Guide for LOTR IV (The Lord of the Rings), defining style and colours for populating a whole world. It defines styles for populations more than characters. On the EA version, clicking on textures samples opened texture pages and motifs to use for character design and texturing.

Another example, a Style Guide for EA game “from Russia with Love”, on sixties fashion:

Explaining proper sixties attire in detail to modern artists isn’t as easy as it sounds. The way we dress and handle our bodies is vastly different now than how it was in the Sixties, and part of the job was to explain how a girdle would change body structure and animation, for example.

The Godfather (I), EA games: set design. This is one of the numerous style guides I made for the different mafia compounds in the game. Each guide came with hundreds of textures I created. Each set had a specific colour ambience for each compound. It was an exciting project, as we had to provide an exact representation of the movie, but we couldn’t copy the textures exactly due to copyright reasons. The most important part is to provide an accurate map of all the textures in the compounds, ensuring an accurate representation of each decor.

Character design

I also worked on several character designs, for different video games, including:

My Sims (I and II)

Character design includes: sketches and research, heavily detailed character drawings (not 3D) for outsourcing, colourways, variations, accessories, and motif textures when necessary. Creating designs for outsourcing isn’t easy. While designing a character in-house just needs a few sketches and a discussion with on-site artists, a design for outsourcing needs to address any detail, any question for an artist to work on their own.

MiniTycoon: Casino

Kawai, chibi Casino game. I worked on this with a former EA art director.

Character design, texture design, colorways, fashion ideas, props.

More recently, I was one of the Art Directors on this announced project. Official website : please click and enter Date of Birth to watch .

Let’s just say that this project created some interesting problems in terms of voice and vision, and the opportunity to solve them was one of the most pivotal and enjoyable moments of my career.
Until we can talk about it more, here’s one of the official announcements:

Thank you for your attention. To contact me: