Featured Pro Portfolio: Tiberius Viris

The latest animated feature I just finished working on, Smallfoot, is also one of my favorites to this date. Not only did it have a wide array of beautiful, stylized environments, but I also got to lead a fantastic team of artists that became sort of a “work family” throughout the year we spent on this project. If you’re interested to keep up with news about it, check out my ArtStation Blog.

In terms of hiring for a film/game project, I think the best portfolios are the ones that try to be as diverse as possible while maintaining a consistent quality. For example, if you’re an environment concept artist, you should have a few different sci-fi scenes (such as alien worlds, starship interiors, space scenes), a few historical/Earth based environments and some fantasy pieces. Of course, originality and interesting designs are important too and that’s where you can let your personal style shine!

This is actually an atypical story as my university degree is in Computer Science which, technically, has nothing to do with art! It so happened though that during my Master studies I chose to specialize in Artificial Intelligence – Images and Shapes recognition. This meant programming robots to understand and recognize their environment.

Without knowing it at that time, this gave me all the prerequisites for matte painting since in order to analyze the environment – as seen through a photo sensor – we had to understand things like levels, atmospheric perspective, lens distortion etc.  Later on that year, one of the Lord of the Rings movies was released and I remember being so amazed at all the environments they created digitally that I started to do some research into how they were made. This lead me to find about matte painting and here I am, 15 years later.

There’s a few of them: