Introduction

I am actually pretty new to game industry. I was working as architecture designer and architectural visualization render artist for two and half years, however, my true interest is game art. I have been a big gamer since I was a kid. To achieve this goal, I took some time to focus on individual classes at Gnomon Visual FX School, and also learning daily from my husband who is working in the game industry. Since then, I have become very familiar with game industry art workflow, such as maintaining proper pixel density, layering PBR materials, creating reusable tileable textures, UV map tricks, etc. I have learned from many professionals and am continuing to adopt their techniques into my workflow.

Having graduated from the University of Southern California (USC) through the Master Degree – Architecture Design program I have gained strong experience in architectural design and rendering plus lighting experience. I have a good sense of realistic space which I gained through 7 years of studying architecture and 2.5 years of working as a professional architectural artist.

Creating the Victorian Environment

It is not a replica of real room. The idea comes from the abandoned royal family home. It was made as if it were for a game, so it might be a little dramatic. I made up a little story to narrow the concept style to the French revolution mixed with an early Victorian era. My story, in short, was this: a wealthy family living in the countryside of England collected and brought decor and furniture from a an auction of a palace in France. Eventually the last living heir to the English family died while overseas. The home was abandoned as it was, untouched, and unbothered other than by nature itself. The house was rarely seen or inhabited by any other person again.

The idea started in my game prop class at Gnomon, the teacher was showing one of Titus Lunter’s concept pieces as example. So I start to search for more concepts from this artist, and I fell in love with the Victorian room concept at first sight. I liked the lighting and dramatic mood a lot. Also part of me wanted to challenge myself to do Victorian scene, which is one of the hardest styles to model , in my opinion, with its semi-organic shapes repeated in a luxurious fashion. Together with the foliage, I thought it would be a pretty well rounded exercise to display the different skills that were essential to environment artist. Instead of making this scene as one piece for my portfolio, I tried to break it down to different categories like destruction, ornate wood and stonework, fabric, character modeling, foliage etc.

Environment Production Breakdown

The main stages of production were making props to enrich the scene. After asking for permission from Titus Lunter I started with blocking out the scene and setting up the main camera to match with the concept. Since I can’t have the exact scale of the room or use a floor plan, matching the camera to the concept is the best way to keep things tight. Also, having an architecture background helped a lot interims of maintaining scale and proportion.

After I got the general block out completed with simple cube geometry I created a kind of “art sheet” to further define my work flow, such as creating modular pieces, tileable textures, and basically figuring out which parts can be reused, maximize UV space, and what props are going to be unique pieces. And then from there, I just follow the order of biggest to the smallest as to what I will complete.