Artist Highlight: Jeff Jonas

EQ2Players is highlighting another team member, this time Jeff Jonas, player artist for EverQuest II.

My role on the EQII team is to create objects that our player characters use, wear, or ride. I am known as a “wearables” guy. A project like this needs thousands of items to make it fun and exciting. Wearables run the gamut from Barbarian helmets, to collector’s capes, and full vampire armor sets, to wieldables such as swords and staffs, to rideables like the hover discs I have created. Other wearables can be backpacks, or armbands.

What’s your favourite thing that you’ve done for EQII?

To keep things fresh we have incorporated ways to streamline and add to our character templates. Since we support over 50 male and female player characters, we need to be careful to change our templates. One way we have made things more interesting is our “snap-on” system that uses offset to add objects to existing templates.

The newest exciting technology we implemented was designed by Bill Yeatts, and coded by Brian Belfield. This cool system allows our backpacks to have items swivel and bounce around like real objects kind of do- without additional animator time. This allowed me to make a few popular backpack items such as the Frostfell backpacks of last year, and the latest Brewmeister barrel backpacks. Other backpacks are coming for other tradeskills as well. It’s a lot of fun to see the items bouncing along in our test viewer.

Do you have any special (or just super fun) projects you’re working on now for EQII?

I reckon the new backpacks I alluded to above are the most exciting things upcoming in my work path. Right now I’m focusing on warm garments for certain icy areas, and tinkering with some other items. EQII always has something interesting lined up for me down the trail.

You can read the complete interview as well as see additional screen shots of character artwork that Jeff has created at EQ2Players.