Level Artist

Often times put under the banner of Environment Artists, Level artists are the people who are specialised in the creations of worlds through the placement of assets. They focus on the storytelling of locations and take the grey boxes that level designers leave behind and work together with them to make those locations come to life.

Not only are they responsible for bringing these locations and their stories. They also focus on the open world context in between those locations too. By focusing on the natural aspects in between those locations. Depending on the studio and the games they create.

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Set dressing in engine, telling a visual story based on narrative, placing assets, building locations, using scene logic to make cohesive spaces,…

Cooperating with the Art Director and Art Leads to maintain artistic consistency and vision for the game while building stellar levels and scenes according to project needs.

Great sense of scale, proportion, and composition.

Strong understanding of environmental storytelling, set dressing and observation skills

Ensure levels are profiled and optimized to adhere to performance targets where needed together with technical artists.

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Level artists are their to build out the world of video games. As part of this most of your time will be spent on the set dressing of locations built by level designers. This will often time lead to regular meetings and conversations with level designers with level designers. However, since you will be building the world you will also be talking to Narrative designers (those who build the stories) and Gameplay designers  occasionally narrative designer to make sure both the structure and storytelling is aligned between all of you.

As previously mentioned, most of your time will be spent working closely together with Level Designers. Together you will be building locations from the ground up, iterating together to make the best location that works both for gameplay and visuals. When doing so you will also be working with your Senior and Lead environment (or level artists) to make sure the visuals hit their benchmarks.

Other than this close collaboration, Prop artists and potentially outsource artists will also be working together with you at times to make sure that the assets they build are working for when you use them.And you will also work together with Narrative and Gameplay Designers.

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