Most of the team is spread out on the ground floor of one of the buildings at Letterman Digital Arts Center, the combined home of LucasArts, Lucasfilm and ILM at the Presidio in San Francisco. The groups within are spread out by discipline, but nothing happens in isolation. I wanted to call out not only some of these roles, but also the connections between roles that make this game possible.
Some of them seem obvious -- the animation group bleeds into the character design team, which is a stone's throw away from the cinematics team, who takes their work and directs the characters and settings to perform the cutscene animation that propels the story of The Force Unleashed along. The cinematics director is responsible for making sure the pacing and the camera cuts come together, while the lead animator is responsible for actually approving the animation -- like the way Juno Eclipse flips her hair. It's a very tight interaction between the groups.
The cutting edge technologies being folded into The Force Unleashed demand a stable bridge between the content artists and the engineers. One group envisions the incredible scenarios and breathtaking worlds to be explored in next-generation gameplay, while the latter is knee-deep in code. Connecting these disciplines are the art TDs (technical directors).
Their role is very complex and multilayered, but in a broad sense, they're the glue that holds everything together. On one side of the spectrum, you might have an artist say, "I want to have a slug-like creature imbued with Digital Molecular Matter (DMM) so that it is slick and slippery on one end, and really sticky on the bottom." An art TD would be able to crack and solve that request by working with the engineer to serve up a work-flow and pipeline to the artist, so they can create that experience in the game. Another example where art TDs are very helpful are in the shapes we use to get really accurate faces for the characters in the games, or shaders that make the characters' eyes scintillate and reflect in truly realistic ways.
Other technical directors are the Character TDs, who bridge similar worlds. The concept art and character designers define the shape and look of the character, like one particular diminutive warrior who enhances his otherwise small shape with a swirl of mechanical limbs. This goes beyond a standard humanoid shape, and requires some extra care when it comes to taking his physiology and applying handles and control points for the animators to be able to move him around. The character TD essentially rigs the character for animation, but also builds the pipeline and works with the artists to establish how to build, animate, control and export the characters.
