You've Been Promoted!

I was the third person hired on for the contract 3D Artist position. Total, I think there were 11 of us hired on at different times over the period of about 6 months. The first hiree was "really" promoted and hired on full time when he hit about 6 months on his contract. Us contractors were seated upstairs with the testers, away from the full timers. There was definitely a disconnect. We only talked to our leads and art directors. Well this first guy went downstairs when he was hired on full time. No biggie, it was expected. Well at my 6 month mark, myself and hirees two and four were given promotions as well.

We became Environment Artists and were moved downstairs. This put us into a little bit of limbo. We weren't full timers but we weren't part of the group upstairs. We had just proved ourselves for 6 months as object artists but now we were under scrutiny again sitting next to all of the other full time environment artists. Basically, it was exciting but stressfull. This happened about half way through the BFG.

On to my first task as an environment artist. I was given the task to finish out and detail the very first interior Forerunner structure you come upon and it's exterior entrances. This is on The Ark level after you kill the Hunters and climb the hill into the cave. A lot of this work was tweaking uvs and adding details. Some of this work got covered up or changed on another finish pass but a lot of it stayed intact. I added a floor glass element to break up the floor and some exterior disk pylons. Some of this was changed but the ideas were mine. You'll find this a lot in all of the levels. There were quite a few instances where people would get assigned the same thing a little while after it was already worked on. It was a little difficult to get used to this but it makes the game look phenomenal. Different artists have styles and ideas about things and no one artist can possibly have made one environment what it was. Some of what I did was populate the Forerunner style from the rest of the level into this space. You may think this doesn't take much but believe me it does. Plus, it was kind of a good task to help me learn the environment pipeline. Remember, artists are responsible for getting our work in game and addressing any of it's bugs. Here are a couple of shots of that  area that did not change after I worked on it.