Johnny Costello

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Hey, welcome to my game art portfolio website!

I’m currently working for Nvidia (Game Developer Technology) in Redmond, WA as a Senior Technical Artist.

At Nvidia, I work on 3 – 4 game titles per year (AAA – A). While Nvidia isn’t a game developer themselves, my division works exclusively on game titles for PC and next-gen consoles. From the perspective of the game developers that I work with, my role is essentially that of an art/technical art contractor.

Here are some game titles that I’ve worked on.

Check out my artwork here or on my ArtStation page.

Lately, I’ve been working a lot with “enhancing” low-resolution game textures using deep learning. There are a lot of somewhat older games that are still a lot of fun to play and have an active following, but their textures (among other things) are starting to look really dated. Deep learning algorithms can be used to “up-res” these pixelated textures to a higher resolution without losing the shapes and colors of the original texture.

Here’s a comparison of the original, low-res texture and the new texture (128^2 –> 1024^2 pixels):

Modeled in 3dsMax and smoothed using OpenSubdiv

Blank mesh ready for sculpting in Zbrush.  Old wood and rusty, rusty metal.  Gonna be fun.

Spent some time sculpting in Zbrush making some reusable assets for general environments: bricks, stratified rock, igneous rock, rock shards, and cinder blocks.

Zbrush brick wall sculpt

Zbrush layered stone sculpt

Zbrush igneous rocks sculpt

Zbrush rock shards sculpt

Zbrush cinder block wall sculpt

Creating my favorite Russian experimental assault rifle design: the Korobov TKB-022 (plus some sci-fi extras).  Work in progress:

Sept. 4: TKB-022

Sept. 15: TKB-022

The Mighty Square bot from Ashley Wood’s World War Robot in the EMGY colorway. Always thought these guys were some of the creepiest bots in WWR.

Modeled in 3ds Max using OpenSubdiv for the high-poly, and then rendered in Marmoset Toolbag with PBR (metal+rough).

Here’s a link to this asset in ArtStation: https://ghost0926.artstation.com/portfolio/wwr-mighty-square

Mighty Square

Mighty Square – Head

Mighty Square – Side/Rear

Mighty Square – Right Front

Landmines & Gas Can

I was on the internet looking at 2D concept art, and a piece of Steve Holt’s caught my eye.  Just a random, futuristic container of sorts.  Made for a quick, fun 3D project (although I need to go back and fix the UVs on the bottom).

Original concept art on the bottom left.

ArtStation link: www.artstation.com/artwork/futuristic-container

Futuristic Container (3dsMax, Marmoset Toolbag, 2014)

I’ve always loved the chunky shapes of this drill case, so I decided to model it this weekend.  Now that I’m finished with it, I wish I had made it able to open!  Maybe I’ll do that next.  I used 3ds Max with the OpenSubDiv modifier again for this one.  It’s really a nice workflow for hard-surface modeling.

Drill Case

Drill Case

Drill Case

Drill Case

The official promotional video for our simulated fur in Far Cry 4 finally came out.  This was a fun project to work on, and it’s great to see the video that marketing put together.