Introduction

Hi, my name is Hunter Mortenson and I’m a character artist with a little over ten years experience in the game industry. I focus on stylized and/or hand-painted character art. I’m a self-taught artist that started learning 3D while in high school through art forums like polycount and the long dead cgchat.com. Most recently I worked in-house at Vigil Games as a character artist on Darksiders 2, but for the past few years I’ve made my living from the Dota 2 workshop on Steam and I’m currently also looking to expand into doing more freelance for some cool stylized projects.

Growing up I loved JRPGs like Final Fantasy 7, Xenogears, etc, so when I started learning 3D I was mostly doing fan arts of various Anime/Manga/JRPG characters. Doing stylized characters really is the type of work I enjoy the most. Back then normal mapping and sculpting wasn’t a thing yet, just good old fashioned hand-painted diffuse maps only. To this day, hand-painting the textures is still my favorite part of 3D, and I do a lot of painting on current gen characters as well. Although hand-painted textures aren’t so common anymore, even with stylized characters, I still find them one of, if not the most important part of the 3D art. Good textures can make a poor model look good and bad textures can make a good model look horrible. That being said, a solid sculpt is still extremely important for a high-quality normal mapped character.

I personally really like to match the concept or look of the original 2D art as much as possible on whatever I’m working on. If something looks cool enough in 2D that you’re going to recreate it in 3D, why would you make changes to the design? It tends to be a bit of a pet peeve of mine when I see a 3D artist credit someone for a concept they’re using, but then they went and changed a bunch of details. So I try to be pretty meticulous in matching every aspect I can when translating something to 3D (proportions, silhouette, colors, pose, etc). I spend a lot of time making sure I’m sticking to the concept and comparing shapes/proportions and not leaving anything “good enough” and pushing it until I can’t see anything off from the original. Even doing so you’ll likely end up with a few errors, or areas that could be improved when you look back at a project.