Psychonauts 2

Razputin “Raz” Aquato, trained acrobat and powerful young psychic, has realized his lifelong dream of joining the international psychic espionage organization known as the Psychonauts! But these psychic super spies are in trouble. Their leader hasn't been the same since he was rescued from a kidnapping, and what's worse, there's a mole hiding in headquarters. Combining quirky missions and mysterious conspiracies, Psychonauts 2 is a platform-adventure game with cinematic style and tons of customizable psychic powers. Psychonauts 2 serves up danger, excitement and laughs in equal measure as players guide Raz on a journey through the minds of friends and foes on a quest to defeat a murderous psychic villain.

I worked on lot of different aspects of Psychonauts 2 , including level design, concept art, and lighting.

I did this mood painting for the Bob Zanotto boss encounter. The gameplay was still in early prototyping at this stage.

I did this early concept for the first phase of the final boss encounter of the game. I also co-designed all three phases and scripted the first phase of the boss level.

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I designed a lot of the combat moves for the second phase of the boss encounter, including the water snakes.

I did the primary lighting on all of the cutscenes for the final boss level. This is the intro cutscene to the first part of the level (which I also designed and scripted). Level and character art by the Psychonauts 2 team.

I lit all the final boss level. The video below shows an example of the lighting I did for the flooded mental town of Grulovia. Level and character art by the Psychonauts 2 team.

I lit this long cutscene which transitions from phase 2 to phase 3 of the final boss fight. Level and character art by the Psychonauts 2 team.

I got to light this very cool music video style cutscene, featuring an amazing song written by Peter McConnell and sung by Jack Black! Level and character art by the Psychonauts 2 team.

Psychonauts 2 had a lot of cutscenes and many of them were very long with lots of characters. Here is an example of one of the many I lit. These could be especially challenging because of all of the per-shot lighting setups. Level and character art by the Psychonauts 2 team.

I created some Unreal Editor Widget tools to help in the lighting process. The tool is shown below to the left of the game window. It was a dockable panel and had two primary modes -- a PBR albedo range checker and a FALSE COLOR LUT mode.

This image shows the game scene as the player would see it.

This image shows the same scene as above with the FALSE COLOR LUT applied. This applies an arbitrary gradient based on the luminance of the scene, which was a great way for us to check our values. It was especially useful for cutscene lighting and acted as a guide for consistent exposure values for faces.

This image shows the scene with the PBR Diffuse Cheek applied. This mode highlights albedo values that are out of PBR range. Values that are too bright are colored bright green and albedo values that are too dark are colored bright red.

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