Josh Larsen
Environment Artist :: Digital Artist
Forza Motorsport
Working on a title like Forza Motorsport has allowed me to create amazingly realistic environments and work with some of the best artists and engineers in the business. These games have pushed my World Building skills like nothing else I have ever done before.
I worked on Forza 7 in a similar role to 6, working with outsourcers and setting quality bars and reviewing content and builds. This version brought our biggest graphical upgrade as we went full PBR on all our materials. I loved the work on the sourcing for this content and bringing the environments up to a new set of graphic standards. The work we had done getting color correct reference on the previous two titles really payed off as we made this switch.
Forza 6 was a huge expansion on what we had done adding night, wet and a huge number of new tracks. This brought me to several more real world locations, capturing as much as we possibly could from sun up until sun down. For production on this title, I oversaw the art side of our vendor outsourcing and kept a group of artists busy looking through hundreds and hundreds of assets and pieces of art.
Forza 5 was a launch title for the Xbox One and required a crazy amount of work to create what we did. I traveled to 5 different real world locations and documented every surface and walked literally every inch of the racetracks. I mainly did art for this release, working 'between the barriers' on the road surfaces painting the race story into the tracks. Racing lines and ill-fated skids tell the players a story of what to do and what not to do.
For Forza Motorsport 4, I prototyped many of the visual systems used in the game. We create the models and textures which tell the game engine how to combine these elements to look like a real place with real things in it. During production, I led a small group of artists updating our existing tracks and assets and teaching them the new systems we were using. To date, Forza 4 has sold almost 4 million copies worldwide.
For Forza 3, I also did pre-production work updating our systems and technologies. For our reveal, I had the pleasure of working with a group of artists updating the Fujimi Kaido track for our E3 announcement video below. During production, I worked with a team of artists updating the rest of the 13 miles of track! I also worked on Suzuka and several other tracks in the game.
