Baldur's Gate 3
We took 80 grooms to final for Larian, from human beards to goblins, githyanki and three of the companions, before the game entered Early Access. Two and a half years later they hired us again for something else: cutscene lighting on 354 scenes, in their own engine.
Larian needed range without the look coming apart. A goblin's hair had to look unkempt and nasty, a harpy's and an ogre's had nothing human to borrow from, and the human cast ran from short beards to long curls, yet every style had to sit in the same game and inside a triangle budget set per style, 20,000 for a short cut and 30,000 for a long one. The lighting brief in 2023 carried a different risk: working inside Larian's own engine, on cutscenes that were already built, in the last seven months before launch.
We built the grooms as hair cards in FibR, our own Maya tool, and took each one through blockout, mid-production and final, with Larian's notes coming in from the blockout onwards, while a change of silhouette was still cheap. The triangle count was checked against the style's budget at every internal review alongside the look, so a style that crept over (one short cut came in at 22,044 against 20,000) went back to the artist from our own review. On the lighting, the first two months went on learning Larian's engine and lighting a pilot scene, and production scenes started in March, so the learning happened on a scene nobody was going to ship.
80 grooms at final: 57 human, 11 of them beards, 7 goblin, 7 githyanki, 2 elf, and one each for a gnome, a harpy, an ogre and a tiefling, plus the hair for Lae'zel, Astarion and Shadowheart. Then 354 lit cutscenes, the last of them logged the week before the PC launch of a game that went on to win Game of the Year in 2023.
Airship were an integral part of developing Baldur's Gate 3. They delivered exceptional hairstyles and were great to work with.
A cast this varied, inside your budget.
An art and tech-art studio of 100+ artists, credited on 82 shipped titles since 2017.
