Pauline: I’m 25 years old, and I come from a little place called Médière in the east of France. I’m actually a ‘happy accident’ in the 3D community: I always dreamed of becoming a groom and working with horses, but after a severe injury I was told that working in that field wasn’t an option anymore. At that time, I was lucky to have a mom playing a lot of Zelda, and I spent a lot of time watching her. That’s how I got into video games!

I moved to Paris 8 years ago to study Game Art at ISART Digital, and I got my master’s degree 3 years ago. I’ve been working as a freelance artist for a bit more than 4 years now. I did a lot of illustration at first and now I teach Substance Designer, Substance Painter and a little bit of Zbrush.

I first discovered Substance at school. We were still creating all of our textures with Photoshop at the time, and we had a presentation of Substance Designer during a night class. The ‘wow’ effect was all over the place. It looked so easy, and it could give us a lot of options...

But once I got my hands in it, I hated the whole thing. It felt too much like creating shaders in Unreal Engine. The use of nodes was one of the most challenging things I had to work out.