Prototype Area

Before full production began, I joined early to work with the art director on defining a potential visual direction for the game. We quickly aligned on a hand-painted, stylized fantasy aesthetic, which became the focus of early exploration. As part of this effort, I built a base temple environment to test material blending techniques and help establish the overall look and feel. While this environment did not make it into the final game, the work informed later development and ultimately evolved into what became the crypt tileset.

This was right off the tail of Alien: Crucible . So to just get our initial tests going, characters had not even been built yet for the game, hence why there is the Space Marine placeholder character visable in some of the screens.

Surface Exploration

Part of this work also involved creating a range of hand-painted textures and evaluating how they blended together across different environments. The game engine supported a vertex-painting system that allowed up to three textures to be blended on a single surface, which was more performance-intensive than using a standard single material. Even so, this approach was selectively used where it added clear visual value, and those cases were explored and applied as needed.

DUNGEON SIEGE 3
2011
Studio : Obsidian Entertainment

Role :  Environment Artist

Environmental Creation and Set Dressing

As part of the environment team, I regularly worked on look development and tileset creation for various areas of the game. This included building modular tilesets that could be efficiently reused, along with the supporting prop sets designed to fit naturally within each environment. A strong emphasis was placed on managing poly counts and texture usage to meet performance targets. The process often felt like solving a visual and technical puzzle, balancing efficiency with visual clarity. Below are examples of areas I contributed to directly, including both in-game environments and work that did not ultimately ship.

The art style for Dungeon Siege III was crafted from the begining to be a bit stylized and in some cases have a hand painted feeling to it. This was before the days of cranking things out via Substance Painter/Designer so as such, required a much more hands on approach to how everything was created and crafted.