Welcome
Crystal is a 3D Environment and Technical Artist dedicated to bringing projects to life.
Using a wide range of skills which have come from diving into new roles within projects and a love of learning.
Covering the 3D process from start to finish, Crystal is an asset to any team.
3D Modelling and Texturing
My journey in 3D Art started with modelling.
Learning the steps of high-low poly baking and doing courses in character modelling, environmental grey boxing and Arch-Vis.
I very much enjoy hard surface modelling, and creating optimised UVs for bespoke or trim sheet textures.
My first textures were hand-drawn, but as I continued to create I learned more and soon discovered material editing and shaders.
Materials and Shaders
I first dove into making shaders in Unreal.
I moved to Unity's Shader Graph and learned custom shaders that could change the whole look of a project, creating visual illusions, and tricks to optimise rendering.
Getting into all node-based graphs I learned Substance Designer and started making visual effects that mixed shaders with particle effects inside VFX Graph.
Visual Effects and Lighting
Particle effects let me explore many more visual opportunities in engine.
It was around this time that I also branched into lighting. In addition to setting up lighting in engines, I began optimising custom lighting shaders, adjusting baked lightmaps, and creating special lighting effects.
All these aspects heightened my ability to make whole environments that were bursting with life.
Environment Design
Before I got into 3D art or even digital art, I was a traditional painter, mainly painting landscapes. So being able to learn so much that I could put together entire environments was a dream come true.
While I kept drawing my own concept art to plan out these environments, I was also planning what effects, moving parts, lighting and logic I could add to these environments to really bring them to life.
Having covered such a broad range of the 3D process I started to find shortcuts and tricks to assist in what I was making, leading me to get more into Tech Art and ProcGen.
Tech Art and Tools
After working for so long in node-based shaders and the blueprints of Unreal, I picked up Houdini and the Geo-Nodes of Blender very quickly.
I was tasked a few times with making tools and generators for other artists so we could streamline our process.
Even for early game development, I saw myself developing solutions and procedurally generated tools for our ideas, including Unreal5 and exploring the new PCG feature.
In everything I do I want to be solving problems and finding creative solutions.
