In January 2024, I joined EA Codemasters and set to work immediately on the incredibly exciting UFC5!
I was responsible for creating fighters for live service, which meant producing a swift and high-quality turnover of fighters each month for the monthly patch releases. Add to that the fact that I was the only team member in the Southam studio working on this title, and it was certainly a challenging learning curve!
However, I hit the ground running and I’m proud to say I created a number of fighters that can be seen in the game, some of which have been used as quality benchmarks for making fighters in the future.
I worked on both alter egos of legendary fighters (Vitor Belfort 1997; Chuck Liddell 2003; Clay Guida 2011; Rampage Jackson 2007; Kamaru Usman 2021), and brand-new to the franchise fighters (Tabatha Ricci and Caio Borralho).
I was responsible for all aspects of character creation, including:
- Sculpting to the fighter’s likeness in ZBrush (sometimes using scans, sometimes not if scans were not available)
- Texturing heads and bodies in Photoshop and Substance Painter
- Strand hair creation in Ornatrix and simulation in Frostbite (the game engine for UFC5)
- Card hair creation in Maya
- Kit texturing in Photoshop (shorts, shirts, gumshields)
