Introduction

Hi, my name is Stefan Jevremović I am 30 years old, born and raised in Belgrade the capital of Serbia. I make “magic” for a living… also known as Real-time Visual Effects for video games.

I work at Nordeus an independent mobile-gaming company based in Belgrade, best known for Top Eleven, the world’s most successful mobile sports game with over 180 million downloads. My VFX career started here on our mobile game Spellsouls: Duel of Legends.

I was always passionate about art and games. I started playing with LEGO when I was four and playing games on my Commodore 64 when I was six. The first time I encountered computer graphics was in 1998 – I was on the summer vacation in Spain to visit my cousins. My uncle Kenan worked as an architect back then and he showed me some of his work, it blew my mind! He said: “you can make anything you imagine in this software 3D Studio MAX.”

When I returned to Belgrade with his copy of MAX, I immediately started to teach myself. Not because I wanted one day to do that for a living, but for fun and for the art. Back then there were no video tutorials and in fact not many tutorials at all. Many I found online had a lot of text and few screenshots, so I had to use a dictionary to translate some tutorials.

In 2004 I started playing World of Warcraft far too much. So much so that I didn’t touch 3D for two years. Up to 2006 I had been teaching myself 3D, until I found out there is a VFX School called Chiron in Belgrade, I joined the forum and shared my work and for the first time got real feedback. The community was so helpful, and I made a lot of friends. Dragan, a colleague of mine, helped me a lot back then. He convinced me to enroll in school and learn everything from scratch, but in Autodesk Maya. I learned Modeling, Texturing, Rendering, basic Rigging and Character Animation. I had a problem deciding on which area of 3D I want to focus and specialize in.

After finishing Chiron I mostly got freelance work as Hard-surface 3D modeler. I learned the most by skype share-screening with a friend, who at that time had a lot of projects on his plate, to the extent that sometimes he would give me parts of his project to work on for a fee. After a few projects I became faster and better, it was then he would give me a whole projects to work on. That is how I started, but the problem was I couldn’t really show any of that work as it wasn’t officially mine.

Later I would work beside him on cinematic trailers for World of Battleships and World of Warplanes, and that is where I got first few models I could put into my portfolio, and also when I decided to shift into the gaming industry.

I started at Nordeus as an intern 3D artist. In 3 months I learnt a lot about production for games, but most of all how to be resourceful by kit-bashing assets from the Unity store.

After a year in Nordeus working on an unannounced project, I joined a small team of 11 people that started to work on the next Nordeus game, Spellsouls: Duel of Legends. From prototyping to pre-production I worked as a 3D generalist mostly kit-bashing and modifying the assets to work in our game. Spellsouls is a mobile line-based PVP game where you spawn minions and cast powerful spells to shape the tides of the battle. When we got greenlit for pre-production, more 3D artists joined the team and that is when the company offered me the opportunity to try working as a Visual Effects Artist. After three months I decided it was definitely for me and my career – I had found something I wanted to stick to, learn and improve as much as possible.

Visual Effects in Games