Resume

CHRIS STURGILL

LEAD ENVIRONMENT ARTIST

GAME INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE:

Pocket Gems

March 2015 - Present | San Francisco, CA

Lead Environment Artist - Wild Beyond

  • Came on early in the project, set up processes and pipeline for environments. Worked with technical artists on export tools, environment shaders, and lighting solutions.

  • Trained, supported, and managed small team of environment artists.

  • Worked closely with animators, engineers, and designers on several redesigns of the battle.

  • Modeled and animated simple destructible elements.

Dynamighty

April 2014 - March 2015 | San Francisco, CA

Lead Environment Artist - Fingers of Fury; August-March 2015

  • Modeled and animated characters for mobile rhythm kung fu game.

  • Created environment assets, lit, animated background elements, added final polish.

  • Creating visual development prototypes for future projects. Creating assets, lighting, animation, and scripting.

Environment Artist, COUNTERSPY; April - August 2014

  • Came on late in the project, taking the reins from the former Environment Artist. PS3, PS VITA, Primarily fixed bugs and optimized environment assets.

  • On PS4, did a polish pass on the lighting, helped support animated environmental objects, and created a few new environment assets.

  • On mobile, did a much more extensive optimization and cleanup pass on the environments.

Crystal Dynamics

September 2004 - March 2014 | Redwood City, CA

Principal Environment Artist / SRL (Smart Resourceful Lara) Team Captain, RISE OF THE TOMB RAIDER; October 2013 - March 2014

  • As Team Captain, led the SRL team, a multidisciplinary team to create and polish levels, pushing for the highest quality player experience.

  • Coordinated with the Game Director and Leads to ensure their respective disciplines (Art, Level Design, Combat, Narrative Design, etc) are best represented in our levels.

  • As a Principal Environment Artist, crafted the best-looking levels possible through composition, lighting, visual storytelling, and good old-fashioned asset creation (textures, shaders, environmental and prop modeling).

  • As an artist with a focus on overall scene construction, crafted experiential moments with lighting, post-render effects, and a lot of scripting of transitions between them.

Principal Environment Artist, Unreleased Title; April 2013 - October 2013

  • As a Principal Environment Artist, created next-gen levels with a focus on composition, lighting, visual storytelling, along with asset creation (textures, shaders, environmental and prop modeling).

  • Directed and coordinated efforts of other artists working on level.

Principal Environment Artist / SRL Team Captain, TOMB RAIDER; August 2008 - April 2013

  • As Team Captain, led the SRL team, a multidisciplinary team to create and polish levels that emphasized the player's puzzle-solving skills and the character's emotional performance.

  • As a Principal Environment Artist, tackled the game's "tomb" levels in several ways: from beginning to end, roughing initial composition and lighting before passing off to other artists, or diving in to correct major visual problems. Focused on lighting, set decoration/visual storytelling, and overall scene finalization more than creating individual assets.

  • In the absence of an Environment Art Lead, led explorations of asset creation processes and look-development, especially deferred lighting techniques.

  • During closeout phase, merged teams and shared duties with a Design Co-Captain, focused more on helping to finalize the art and experience aspects of the game.

  • Crafted experiential moments with lighting, post-render render, and a lot of scripting of transitions between them.

Senior Environment Artist, TOMB RAIDER: UNDERWORLD; March 2007 - August 2008

  • As Point Artist of Helheim level, worked closely with a partnered Level Designer to create spaces from the ground-up.

  • Modeled, textured, and created shaders for all level content. Lit level with lightmaps in Maya’s Turtle plug-in and real-time light placement in game editor.

  • Directed other artists working alongside.

Senior Environment Artist, TOMB RAIDER: ANNIVERSARY; April 2006 - March 2007

  • As Point Artist of Egypt level, modeled, textured, and lit major tentpole areas of Egypt level to serve as examples and generate assets for outsourcing.

  • Directed a small team of Junior Artists brought in-house during finishing pass, focusing on rebuilding, re-texturing, and relighting outsourced content for a consistent, polished look.

  • Contributed significantly to creation of other levels as well, while the outsourcing effort was spinning up.

Senior Environment Artist, TOMB RAIDER: LEGEND; September 2004 - March 2006

  • As Point Artist of Flashback level, modeled, textured, lit environments.

  • Worked on virtually all levels over course of project in a significant way.

  • Part of small finishing team, polishing art and fixing bugs to close out project.

 

Demiurge Studios

April 2003-June 2004 | Pittsburgh, PA

Senior Environment Artist

  • As it was a small studio at the time, served as half the art team. Designed/created environments, character designs, concept art, and marketing package (teaser trailers, sample box art, etc) for Hubris: Children of Prometheus, a playable publisher pitch demo.

  • Created environments, designed and created vehicles, and created player skins for the Clone Bandits Unreal Tournament 2004 Mod (a Nvidia $1,000,000 Make Something Unreal Finalist)

  • Contributing Author, Gaming Hacks, by Simon Carless, O’Reilly Media, 2005

  • Extensively documented art-related aspects of UnrealEngine2 and UnrealEngine3 on Unreal Developers Network, working in communication with Epic Games programmers, and created example content that shipped with the free UnrealEngine2 Runtime.

 

Atari Games/Midway Games West

July 1998-February 2003 | Milpitas, CA,

Environment Artist, Unreleased Title; January - February 2003

  • Co-designed, modeled, textured, lit, and animated level

Environment Artist, DR. MUTO; June 2001 - December 2002

  • Created environments (modeling, textures, design, lighting, environment animations, etc) for cartoon-style platformer.

  • Created teaser cinematic sequences incorporating in-game geometry.

Environment Artist, three unreleased titles; August 99 - May 01

Artist, ROADBURNERS; January - April 1999

  • Conceived, designed, and created attract-mode cinematics in Max.

  • Created interface and HUD graphics in Photoshop.

Artist, Unreleased Title; July - September 1998

  • Conceived, designed, and created attract-mode cinematics in Max.

  • Created environmental effects and level elements using Max and Photoshop.

 

OTHER EXPERIENCE

Carnegie Mellon University, Human-Computer Interaction Institute

May 1997- May 1998 | Pittsburgh, PA

Artist in Residence/Visiting Scientist (faculty position), Stage 3 Research Group

  • Modeled and textured library of virtual objects using Max, Photoshop, and Amazon Paint. Designed and constructed desktop and head-mounted display (HMD) virtual environments for virtual reality/3D authoring research.

  • As Head Teaching Assistant for Building Virtual Worlds, trained multidisciplinary class of 50 students to use Max, Amazon Paint, and the Alice 3D animation system, as well as convert media between each phase of production.

SKILLS:

General: Crafting environments, with a passion for lighting, composition, and visual storytelling that supports the experience desired and the design required.  Also, the basics: modeling, texturing, communication and coordination, illustration and painting in traditional and digital media, digital video editing, animation, particle effects, writing/documentation

Software: Unity, Maya, Photoshop, ZBrush, Substance, Knald, xNormal, 3d Studio Max, Unreal

EDUCATION:

University of Virginia, Bachelor of Arts, May 1997; Double Major: Studio Art (Painting/ Electronic Media) and English (Modern Studies)