How I broke into the industry, it was a combination of two things for me. The first of which was going to school. I attended Collège de Bois-de-Boulogne for 3 years, where I received a Technical Diploma for 3D Animation and Modeling. Also, I attended the NAD Centre, which I dropped out of after one semester due to landing the job at Ubisoft. I didn’t go the self-taught route given that I felt I needed the school structure at the time, though I did a fair bit of self-learning in my last year of school to make sure I landed a job at the end of my degree.

Second, where I actually found out about the open Modeler position at Ubisoft Toronto, was on Twitter, before it was even posted on Ubisoft’s job site. Social media and socializing with industry people on there can be very important for both your career and even personally. I ended up meeting and becoming friends with a lot of people I had met on Twitter before I met them in real life when I moved to a new city.

The Creation of the Environments

Anytime I’m tasked with heading up an environment, there’s usually already a high-level brief from the Art Director and sometimes a piece of high-level concept art to get you going. From there, for me, after breaking down the concept and sourcing reference, it’s important to nail the feel (and not necessarily 100% of all the details in it) of that high-level direction and concept while also respecting and adding to the gameplay along with the Level Designer. It’s only ever a jumping off point for the artist. It’s up to you to break it down with your Level Designer and sort out exactly how you’ll build it out. From there, as Level Artists, it’s super important for ‘the big picture’ to be nailed as early as possible. Once you have that base, any detail you add on top of that is just gravy and just keeps making that big picture better and better. Past that, I believe it’s important for any environment to be grounded, to reflect its context and story of those who’ve lived or are living there. Everything should be placed with purpose and never just there ‘to be cool’. This is a topic I’ve covered pretty in-depth in one of my blog posts about some of my guiding art principles which was linked on 80.lv.