Currently living in Nashville, Tennessee, at the “ripe, old” age of 22 is freelance graphic designer Tom Rausch. The majority of his work has revolved around TF2 items, but, he’s also been known to have worked on content for Saints Row IV. Now? It’s his goal to continue his 3D art career and work in the industry full-time. “It really started with Half-Life,” said Rausch, “which made quite an effect on my then-9 year-old mind. Since then, I've been a huge fan of Valve Software's output.” “I had been playing TF2 since launch, initially on the [Xbox 360] version of The Orange Box until a year later, I built a new PC that could run Team Fortress 2. I played religiously pre-economy with folks from the Penny Arcade forums. I made connections with lots of people that played on their private server.” “Eventually, one of the Penny Arcade members started development on a community-created mod for Half-Life 2 called Shotgun Sunrise. I didn't contribute a lot to the mod besides a logo, but I kept in contact with the developers.” “The lead developer, Joe Wintergreen, put me in contact with the modeler for Shotgun Sunrise, Matthew Pierson. He was extremely kind, and basically tutored me on modeling when I was new to it. Joe currently runs his own game development company Impromptu Games, and Matthew Pierson currently [collaborates with] Netherrealms in Chicago - thanks, you two! - From then on, I kept learning until I felt confident enough to start uploading to the TF2 workshop.” Aside from that and TF2, Rausch has been working on visual arts, one way or another, since grace school. As far as 3D work goes, he was able to help out Volition with their Weapon Modding tools, released in August of 2014. “I tested their import tools and made the tutorials that were supplied with it,” he said. “I also continue to work on more realistic modeling and physically based rendering in Unreal Engine 4, which is one of my goals to improve on in 2015.” “I also do odd jobs when I can involving graphic design, logos, et cetera. Usually these are for friends of friends or family members that need work done!” Rausch’s first item was uploaded to the workshop in December of 2011, and after that, his first self-made, the Dry Gulch Gulp, was added to the game in the Summer 2013 crates. “In the period between these items,” he added, “I kept busy attending college and working part time. After I got my first self made, I realised I really could commit to my 3D work as a career option instead of just a fun hobby. Since then I've strived to get more self mades and continue learning!” When the workshop was less of a focus, Rausch had been working part-time at a grocery store, stocking all-day and all-night. Things would change when he started getting paid for his TF2 work. “I had no idea what to expect,” he recalled, “and what I got was far in advance of what I was making while working part-time and spending money on more college classes. All while learning a new craft, and having fun too!” “I was overjoyed, and that night I took my family out to dinner at a nice place, on me of course. TF2 was [also] able to finance my trip to PAX and Valve!” “It has enabled me to push myself farther than I ever would have without TF2,” he continued. “There are so many other modelers working on TF2 that have been doing it far longer than I have. Their immense talent and incredible work have forced me to step-up my art game. I'd say thats the greatest thing its done for me. At the end of it all, you just need to have a good attitude and keep working no matter what.” Rausch intends on pursuing more 3D work in the future, with interest in both film and video games, but leaning more towards the latter. “TF2 still proves to be a very creatively fulfilling avenue for me,” he said, “so I will continue to make a lot of TF2 items! That said, I'm also planning on expanding on my work by releasing various 3D assets for the Unreal Engine 4 marketplace.” Interested in pursuing a similar field? “You need to persevere,” says Rausch. “You will come to plateaus in your work when it will feel like you cannot get any better. Giving up is the worst thing you can do at that point, no matter how hard it seems at the time.” “I want to thank anyone that has collaborated with me in the past,” he concluded, “and the Team Fortress 2 community at large. You are all some of the most inspiring and talented people I know! Here’s to more Team Fortress 2.” Tom Rausch’s work can be found on his Steam Workshop.

About an hour-and-a-half outside of New York City is 24-year-old Penn State graduate, Joe Radak. With a degree in Planetary Sciences and Astronomy, Radak currently does freelance work and takes part in indie game development while on the look-out for a job. In his spare time, he does what most other unemployed people do. Look for jobs, watch House of Cards and West Wing on Netflix, and playing around in games like Dota 2 and Dragon Age: Inquisition. “I started doing TF2 level design back in 2009,” said Radak, the current community event organizer at TF2Maps.net. “I was waiting to head to brunch with my girlfriend [now, fiancée], and decided to crack open Hammer and a couple of tutorials to see what I could do. I found it pretty fun, so I kept rolling with it when I was bored and eventually I realized that this was something that I could use as a serious hobby... and here we are today.” “For game development, I don't really have much before starting TF2. A lot of what I know now I've picked up in the past 5-to-6 years, through observation, talking to other developers, and just a lot of trial and error.” “Dad was an architect, so I picked up some stuff from him.” Radak’s first public map, was Offtrack, a capture-the-flag map that never saw the light of day past its third alpha iteration. “Compared to my most recent public release, I'd say that it's lightyears [worse],” he added. “Even compared my latest non-collab release, Rust, it's [still] a lot [worse].” “Whenever I start a project, I always have two goals: to finish whatever it is with the best quality that I can produce, and second: to learn whatever I can to improve on future projects. If I don't finish a project -- which there are a lot of dead maps I have -- I always try to learn something with it and take something away from it that I can use to improve. Lots and lots of trial and error, hypothesizing ideas and learning from the results of testing.” Back in June of 2014, Radak became involved with the development of End of the Line, the community update that was released in December. He would join fellow level designer, Tim Johnson, in developing the scrapped map for the update, Snowplow. “I started off just [playtesting] the EOTL map,” he said. “At that time is was either [named] Downhill, or Shortcut, I don't remember.” “After a month or so, I was talking to Tim and basically it was realized that the scope of the project was bigger than anticipated. So I offered to help [him] out, he checked with [James McVinnie], who gave the go ahead and I started working on the current stage 2 that afternoon.” Radak was the initial designer and environment artist for the second stage of Snowplow, while Johnson handled the first stage. After a while, the two had begun collaborating with each other on both stages when needed. “After Snowplow launched, a few people know of me through that, but thats about it,” said Radak. “Learning and taking on level design and game development, however, has had a pretty big impact on my life.” “Back when I started doing level design and game development, I wasn't really intending to make it more than just a hobby. Something that I can use to relax with. Originally, when I started school, I was planning to graduate and then go get my doctorate in whatever I felt like specializing in, but as I went through school and did more and more level design, I found that I liked level and game design a little bit more than what I was doing in school at the time.” “Level and game design kind of changed what my plans were while I was in school,” he continued. “I would go to astronomy lectures when I could, and did a lot of astronomy-related things, but I also went to the game club, helped get a set of classes at school set up for people to take to receive a certificate in game design - it's like an associate degree type of thing.” “In my senior year of school, I helped test a game that a couple guys in the astronomy department were making. It was a game that would be used as a web-course for an intro level astronomy class. That was a lot of fun.” “Game design, and level design -- which, up until a few months ago, was all TF2-releated -- basically put me on a career path.” “I wouldn't rule astronomy out,” he assured. “If I could find a job working at a planetarium or observatory or something, I would be really interested. But right now, game development as a career is my focus.” Outside of TF2 work, Radak has also been an active level design for multiplayer components of Black Mesa: Source, along with working on a stand-alone game project of his own, Attuned: An Elemental Journey, a 3D puzzle game on Unreal Engine 4 utilizing the four basic elements to solve tasks and traverse the vibrant landscape. More on Attuned can be found here. “Source, and Hammer specifically, is a ridiculously... weird... engine to work with,” he added. “It will throw errors at you that you have no idea how to fix, or why they happen. It'll crash, or close on you without warning.” “But, if you're willing to put up with that, my best advice is to just do it. Get an idea for a map in your head and make it, the best you can. Then get some people to give you some feedback. If it's harsh? Don't let that get you down. Take it with a grain of salt, learn from it and fix things. Restarting isn't always bad. Just keep iterating and learning, iterating and learning.” “I'm basically a guy with an astrophysics degree who decided to play around with game development as a career path instead of going to graduate school, or working at a university or something,” Radak concluded. “So far it's paid off, I'm happy with what I'm doing and I'll keep doing it until I can't anymore.” Joe Radak’s work can be found on his portfolio.

Born in southern France, but has spent most of his life soaking up the sun in the Magic City is 16-year-old high school sophomore, Erik Colteh. As an item contributor, Colteh saves most of his royalties in hopes of having a comfortable college experience, without having to worry too much about any loans. Colteh hopped on to Steam when he was 13, his first game? Audiosurf. Eventually, he was introduced to 3D modelling by others that he saw making custom Lego pieces. Being a huge fan of Legos, he soon wanted to make his own pieces and minifigures. “I was very engrossed in it,” said Colteh. “[I] eventually experimented with stuff such as resin casting, and downloading sketchup in order to make models.” “I went into Blender once 2.5 came out because of the new layout, and I had started learning about Valve games [like] TF2. I had heard about the Workshop and how you could submit your own items in hopes of getting them in-game, so I decided to jump right in!” “I taught myself the pipeline and how to make my own models, since I didn't know anyone who made items other than myself.” Colteh’s first upload to the Steam Workshop was the Mannifest Destiny, uploaded in late August of 2012. It would be almost a year and a half, and 43 item submissions later before his Medic item, the Colonel’s Coat, was added to the game in February 2014 as part of the Strongbox Pack. Since then, he’s made the cut with a total of 6 in-game items, and a grand total of around $20,000 in royalties. “It was crazy!” he recalled. “When my mom first told me that they deposited about $1,500 in my account, I felt I had won the lotto. I didn't expect myself to make so much money off of one of my favorite games, much less actually get anything ingame.” “I've had bigger paychecks, but that one was the one that really stood out and told me that I should continue making items, and I still do today!” “It's made me feel much more sure of myself in all aspects of my life,” he continued. “I honestly haven't changed at all when it comes to how I live - and overall, the lifestyle is conserved.” “It's told me that it's possible to be successful, even without a degree or even a diploma, and that my modelling and texturing skills are good enough to be noticed by a game company such as Valve. Even if TF2's artstyle is fairly simple, the success tells me I’m doing something right in my life, and that I have qualities that could hopefully set myself apart from the rest.” “I do see myself continuing work on tf2 items for some time, and hopefully I could do some more of different types of modelling and texturing, so I can become well-rounded and maybe even make a career from it all!” While still thinking about career choices, Colteh has his sights set on diving into code and becoming a computer science major, with the end goal of becoming a software engineer, with 3D modeling on the side. When it comes to getting involved in similar work? “Don't go [to] places where you post your items online if you don't have the right attitude,” he concluded. “If you're extremely sensitive to criticism and have just started making items, you have to learn to thicken your skin and accept whatever people tell you, and see if their suggestions make for better items overall.” “I would not be where I am right now had It not been for people criticising my work and telling me what's wrong with it, so that I could eventually improve myself later on, and people giving me tips that I eventually used on how to make my items better as a whole.” Erik Colteh’s work can be found on his Steam Workshop.

Currently residing in the relatively brisk metropolis of Moscow, Russia, is 33-year-old Vladislav. Nicknamed “Vlek” at a young age by his older brother, Vladislav is among the ranks of the growing population of Russian contributors to TF2. When he’s not working on items, he works at television studio as a leading artist, where he makes graphics and animations for various broadcasts. “I started drawing when I was 4 years old,” said Vladislav. “Since I was 8, I've started going to art school - which I've hardly finished due to lack of patience.” “I went to art college and after [graduation] I moved from my small town to the ‘nothern capital,’ Saint Petersburg. I was studying at the academy for 6 years, with a year of preparatory courses before that. That's where I’ve learned 3D modeling.” “Our teacher noticed that I wasn't bad at modeling, so he invited me to work at the studio where he was a game designer. I got hired as modeler and texture artist, and I've started from creating different sorts of planes and tanks for projects that were developed in that studio.” “I've never really liked video games,” he noted. “I thought it was a waste of time, but when I saw the announcement of TF2, I fell in love with that game. Right away I went to purchase a copy. I could have spent days in this game.” “When hats were added in the game, I, just like [many] others, was displeased because some of the original design aspects started changing in a different way. But, eventually I’ve changed my views, and I had some ideas for this game that I wanted to implement.” “After some time, [Valve] made an announcement that ordinary players [could] make items for the game and send them [through the] "Contribute!" website. My dream was to see the Pirate Bandana [added into] the game - and in the 2013 Fall update, it was.” “Creating items for my favorite game was really cool,” he continued. “I had fun making my items, even if some of them were not added.” “Of course, TF2 was my favorite for creating mods. But recently I've decided to try and create mods for other games. For example, stickers for CS:GO, or shirts [for the Merch Workshop.] At the moment, I'd like to move on and try to create something for Dota 2.” “My first model for TF2 was [the] Birdcage, which I'd called Little Friend. Everybody knows that Pyro is strange crazy character - bird brains or something like that, so I thought that it would be interesting to make an item involving a little bird. It didn't take me long time to make it. and it was added after a month.” “When I received my first paycheck from Valve, I was really happy and I decided to keep on making items for my favorite video game. It wasn't just my hobby anymore, I turned it into my second job.” “My work on items took a lot of my free time and sometimes I worked on this for days,” Vladislav recalled. “It is a serious and long work. For instance, [a minigun], Maxim was made in 2 months. I walked [through a] weapon museum to take some photos of machine guns. When I had enough reference material, I drew some sketches. Due to my main job it took me 2 months to make this weapon.” “To be honest it's very frustrating when items that people put a lot of time and effort in are not added,” he stated. “It was upsetting for all those who made about 20 items for Halloween 2014, and none of them were added, even though [those] items were really good and interesting.” “Dear developers, we are doing the same thing. We're building the world of Team Fortress. When you're not accepting our items, we're losing our hope. We are people just like you. Wouldn't be [too] bad if you'd left your comments on our items more often,” he jested. For the time being, Vladislav plans to stick with what he has. If, for whatever reason, he loses his job, he’d surely plan to get into the game design industry again. “To fans of Team Fortress,” he concluded, “I wanna say good luck in this field, and hope you'll get an ultra-rare unusual from a crate!” Vladislav’s work can be found on his Steam Workshop.

In the last year, “McVee” has more-or-less become a household name among the TF2 community. Of course, this title belongs to none other than the 27-year-old director behind End of the Line, James McVinnie. Before the community-made update hit the proverbial shelves, McVinnie joined BioWare in 2009, where he worked on cinematics and animation for the Mass Effect series, Dragon Age series, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and countless bits of downloadable content. Outside the industry, he actively worked on several Source engine mods, including Black Mesa: Source, NeoTokyo, and Zombie Panic: Source. Usually left to his own devices in most of his work, he was a one-man animator army on all fronts. But, everyone has to start somewhere. “I was given my own PC at quite an early age,” McVinnie said, who is entirely self-taught. “That led into game development by making little maps and mods myself, mainly for games like Unreal Tournament and Max Payne. That combined with my love of film eventually bridged into game cinematics.” “A common misconception about the industry is that you need specific education to get into it. But from my experience in Bioware and from talking to friends within many other studios, it couldn't be more wrong.” “They generally look for people who use their initiative to promote themselves and their work without having their hand held. As they want them to be able to come up with ideas within the business. At the time, Bioware were headhunting the machinima community to build a new cinematics team.” “They first picked up Zachariah Scott and Robert Stoneman from LitFuse Films and I got the invite shortly after. There was a few other popular machinima guys who got the invite but didn't make the cut due to being too young at the time or not passing the interview. I had done a lot of small machinima projects and some freelance video work for various companies, those and the [Source mod] trailers. I had a reel of it all up at the time which caught their attention.” “I heard about SFM shortly after Valve released the first video on it, being the Day of Defeat trailer,” he added. “At the time, I was using the Source demo smoother to do camera work for my machinimas and trailers which was really archaic.” “I wanted to make a decent length video, but felt like the smoother was a hinderance and didn't give me enough control to do what I wanted. So I ended up dropping a lot of ideas at the time. One being Practical Problems. When SFM finally came out I knew exactly what i was going to do with it.” Practical Problems had been planned out for years, and when the tools were finally available, it took McVinnie only 3 days to develop the short. “End of the Line was a spontaneous project that kept getting bigger,” he said. “It came from a combination of various things such as dealing with stress from work, overcoming health issues, and the need to make a train crash. So it was a very personal project at the start.” “At the time of the trailer [about 6-7 months into development], most of the technically complex shots had been mostly finished. Such as the big crash shot and Heavy impact, some of the chase in the camper and some of the Scout on the train shots. It was a case of making sure we could hit all the high points we wanted to before pushing into getting the grunt of the work done. Which required a lot of animation time.” About a week after the release of the trailer, McVinnie was invited out to Valve, and was asked to bring along the extra content not seen in the trailer. “After getting an extended tour and lunch with the SFM guys, I was asked to set up my laptop on their projector to show them what I had,” he recalled. “There was only about 4 of them in the room, but while my back was turned to set up the laptop, the room had apparently filled with about 30 Valve guys - including people like Robin Walker and Erik Wolpaw.” “I was then asked to give a presentation on the video and follow it up with a Q&A. Robin approached me after and proposed the idea [of making it official].” Shortly after the proposal, McVinnie quit his job at BioWare. “I was pretty numb to everything during the time in the office,” he said. “I was still in the ‘I'm in Valve...’ mindset. It didn't really set in until I got back to my hotel room. Then, we went out and had a good time. It was unexpected for sure.” His new life had become a sort-of continual Source Filmmaker purgatory. The typical day was simple: wake up, scream at SFM for 14 hours, test the Snowplow map, and go back to sleep, with maybe a meal or two in-between. This would be the case until October of 2014. “I'd take a weekend or 2 off each month,” he assured. “Me and Luke - character animator - would have to shout at each other to take breaks. I'd try to dedicate a few evenings a week to play games or do something else for a few hours.” “The whole production felt like overtime really, so ‘enough’ and ‘too much’ got real blurry. If I got into a good swing of things I'd sometimes pull an all nighter.” “It was tiring and stressful. Even landed me in the hospital once. But I'm glad it happened. There were a lot of lessons learned, creatively and socially. Things that will really help in the future. It'll also be funding for me going independently into more enjoyable personal projects outside of TF2.” “I'm going to ride the personal projects as long as they're still fun to do and a viable option. Going back to the industry is safety net that I can avoid for now.” Among some of McVinnie’s personal favorites in his work? Well, first of all, spoiler alert for Mass Effect 3. “Killing Kai Leng,” he said. “He was originally going to be killed off in gameplay but I pitched the idea to have a more personal send off which went down really well and ended up being some of the fans’ favorite moment.” “The anger behind it meant that some full paragon players of the trilogy took their only renegade option, which was super satisfying.” Also among his favorites, the crash scene in End of the Line. “Lots of people called out the Super 8 movie similarities which were true as that scene gave me the idea,” he confirmed. “It also didn't help that I was getting pointers from a guy who worked on the actual Super 8 scene.” While McVinnie can’t quite go into detail about his future projects just now, he can assure that when it’s presentable enough, there will be a few cool surprises in-store. Want to try and follow in his footsteps? “Make sure your creative work is aimed at people like yourself,” he concluded. “Trying to make something aimed at a popular or current target audience which you're not part of will end in a worse product. You may think that people won't like your idea - but if you like it, other people out there will too.” James McVinnie’s work can be found on his Youtube Channel and his Tumblr.