Hey there!
Thank you for taking a look at my portfolio! :)
info Clicking “Felix’s portfolio” in the top left corner brings you back to the top of this page.
Here are links to the various topics:
Professional Work:
Killzone: Shadow Fall
Horizon: Zero Dawn
Horizon: Forbidden West
Horizon: Call of the Mountain
Personal Work:
Project: Millennium
Project: PeaceKeeper
Aliens Nightmare Asylum
Lost Hope (HL2)
Professional Work
Killzone: Shadow Fall
2011 - 2015
Killzone: Shadow Fall offered an unique opportunity to fill a needed role on the environment art team as dedicated Skybox artist. Having learnt how to create shaders and particle effects during Killzone 3’s production, and having experience making matte paintings made it possible for me to helm that role independently.
As much as I adored working closely with my environment art team/friends, having a massive empty palette around their beautiful level art felt like a treat!
I worked closely with the Art-Directors to finetune composition, collaborated with the lighting team to adjust the overall level tone, mood, and lighting directions, worked closely with the cinematic and VFX teams to make everything feel alive, and of course integrated my work with the env-teams levels - making the skybox feel like a consistent extension of their work.
The video above shows the level 9 mission cinematic outro. This was put together surprisingly quickly as I was able to reuse a lot of the levels skybox to composit together an epic battlefield that our hero could escape through. Very fun to work on!
I was responsible for the terrain and city, the vistas, the skybox, atmospherics, and distant theatre of war vfx.
Here we see the level 4 mission intro. This was used in the first Killzone Shadow Fall trailer, and needed to be as impressive as possible (read: a lot of polish - I actually remade this skybox 3 times over 7 months!)
I was responsible for the city / skybox, and most of the atmospheric VFX.
Horizon: Zero Dawn
2015- 2017
After having worked on the skyboxes of Killzone Shadow Fall, I continued creating skies and clouds for Horizon - prototyping various skybox creation methods.
As Guerrilla’s current Nubis cloud system started coming online my focus shifted back to environment art, where I helped create the mysterious hidden Cauldron’s of Horizon. (Environment, Shader, VFX)
Towards the end of production I took a generalist role supporting the cinematics, creating shot specific backgrounds, creating and placing VFX, lighting cinematics, and bespoke skybox work.
Horizon: Forbidden West
2017 - 2020
At the start of Forbidden West’s development I had the opportunity to join the Concept Art department. I focused on exploring the San-Francisco ecotope and various surrounding environments, new Cauldron ideas, the Sea-Faring Tribe, and Faro facilities.
Horizon: Call of the Mountain
2020- 2023
As Project Art-Director On Horizon: Call of the Mountain my main focus was providing feedback on the production of environments, skybox art, characters, asset and shaders, VFX, and UI art. Directing art adjustments based on playtest feedback. Prototyping asset upressing pipelines…
However, where possible I would try and support the team by making art.
Below shows a rain effect I made for when the player climbs the tallneck in the pouring rain. It used a tri-planar projection in pre-deformed object space to allow the tallneck to move without the streaks floating or the need for an extra UV set.
I was also able to spend time creating the distant atmospherics of H:CotW, as I felt the consistency between Horizon’s vibrant atmosphere was important for making the VR title feel part of the Horizon universe.
The static cloud cards were multi-buffer captures from Forbidden West’s cloudscape, setup to blend in the correct lighting angle based on the level’s sun position. This made creating and adjusting cloud compositions quick and easy.
The moving fog planes were made using simple blends in the shader.
The center image of the moving clouds around the mountain peak is a more complex shader that was setup to allow vertex painting to blend in lit and shadowy areas, as well transparency for the edges of the cloud cards.
Lastly I wanted to share this single and sadly only image of an element of the rather weird lens flare system we came up with.
We lined the players field of view with eyelash cards, that would become additively visible when the sun would be on the opposite side of the FoV.
The sun itself had a lens flare inspired by renditions of astigmatism.
We also lifted all dark values to a warm subdermal orange to fake the players eye’s sclera being lit by sunlight when the sun was in a certain range of the FoV.
It was amazing how natural it felt once implemented, how weird it was without it, and how clearly it shows how the brain filters out rather profound visual effects we see every day.
Ingame the texture didnt scroll over time, instead the irridescent texture shifted based on sun position.
Personal Work
Project Millennium
2020- 2023
Project Millennium is the spiritual successor of my old Half-Life 2 mod “Lost Hope”. It draws from the same inspiration such as Otomo’s Akira universe, as well as Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell, numerous fictional cityscapes, some elements from scifi classics such as Alien and Bladerunner, and of course a healthy amount of brutalist architecture.
I have spent a lot of time creating and finetuning the hand-drawn/outline rendering setup, using only techniques that are available in game engines (so non are made using Blender’s GreasePencil or Freestyle lines).
It’s essentially a post-process shader that uses sobel filters to process a bunch of buffers/channels that have value differences which create the lines.
I intend to eventually get this rendering style running in real-time in a game engine, but for now will keep exploring and prototyping this universe in Blender, as its quick and not as limiting as using an engine.
Project PeaceKeeper
2013- 2020
This project started the moment I saw the ISS get obliterated in Gravity (2013). I was convinced I could rip a space station apart, at the level of detail shown in the movie, … and in real-time.
It was a great way to get comfortable in Unreal 4 and eventually 5, but I never got around to actually blowing the space station up.
Aliens: Nightmare Asylum
2024
This was a personal project I did to get more comfortable using Blender.
I had a lot of fun playing around with the different smoke and fire simulations, finally sculpting something using Blender instead of zBrush, hand modelling motionblurred water droplets (lol), and compositing the image inside Blender (instead of Photoshop).
The xenomorph was only really sculpted for the angle it is mostly viewed from, and doesnt even have legs or a tail...
Pick up the Aliens: Nightmare Asylum graphic novel if you have the chance! It's one of the prettier Alien comics, and certainly is my favorite.
Lost Hope (HL2)
2004-2010(?)
This project was started a few weeks after I finished playing through Half-Life 2. With some early concept art setting the scope to “overly ambitious”, and not having any real experience making game assets, I felt ready to start.
Looking back I could have set more realistic goals, and started with a smaller project, but I regret nothing.
I loved learning the tools needed to make this, loved working on it, and it paid off by providing me a portfolio that earned me an internship at Guerrilla Games.
