Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Professional Environment Artist's Portfolio Reviews


Jay Kyburz: www.jaykyburz.com     

            Jay Kyburz is a professional environmental/level artist who has worked on four major titled games in the game industry.  These four games include: Bioshock, Swat 4: The Stetchkob Syndicate, Tribes: Vengeance and Freedom Force.  His portfolio website is pretty bland with a plain white background and a large image from the Arcadia section in Bioshock.  He has four separate links to the major game titles that he has worked on and these links will take you to the environments that he has created.  The portfolio website gets the point across and doesn’t explain the process of how he created the environments but is focused more on showing off what he has created.  He brings the visuals of his art to the forefront of his website and keeps the descriptions to a minimum.  I will say that I am a bigger fan of his art than of the style of his website.   Bioshock be worked more on the environmental designs but on the others he was either lead designer or level designer.  I enjoy his art in bioshock because of the stylistic choices that were made to create this art deco dystopian nightmarish place.


            Jason Lavoie is a professional environment artist who is currently working for Digital Extremes.  He has worked on two shipped titles in his professional career.  These games are The Darkness II and Hyperspace Madness.  His portfolio website is putting his art at the forefront of importance.  He has the major titles that he has worked on in three major images.  Clicking on these images will take to the specific pieces that he worked on in the project.  These images can also be clicked on and the high res version of the image can be seen with all of the detail of the piece showing.  The pieces that he worked on in Hyperspace Madness were more on the prop side than the modeling side.  If you click on the The Darkness links you can get more of a feel to what type of art he can create.  I enjoy his art because it is very clean work.  The buildings that were created for the game are great looking and if I could create pieces to similar quality I don’t think I would have much trouble locating a position.  The Estacado Mansion Cellar images I particularly like because this is similar to the style of pieces that I like to create in my spare time.  I think if I emulate pieces of this quality it will only help me in the long run.


            Paul Jones is a professional environment artist who is currently working for TT-Fusion in Wilmslow, Manchester, U.K. on a recently announced WiiU LEGO City project.  He has worked on numerous jobs in the past and most recently worked the game of the year Batman:  Arkham City.  He has also worked on other games such as Unreal Tournament III, Unreal Championship II and Battlestar Galatica most recently.  His personal portfolio website is very simple in nature but is very easy to navigate and use.  He has all the projects that he has worked on on the left side of the screen and upon clicking on these links you will be brought to the images of what he worked on with a sliding bar to navigate up and down.  If you were to click on these images you would be able to see the higher resolution images for each image.  I really enjoy his work because of the amount of detail that he uses when creating his environments.  He is capable of doing very different styles and not just using the dark environments of Batman and Unreal that are showcased in his previous jobs.  I also enjoy the amount of different types of work he has done.  He showcases his concept art work, final environments, props, weapons and characters that he has worked on.  I would really like to get to the level of talent that Paul Jones has in created environments to better my career.

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