Björn Arvidsson: senior character artist interview

Hi, I'm Björn and I am currently working as the character artist at newly founded Embark Studios in Stockholm. I’ve been in the games industry for 6 years now, almost all of them at DICE in Stockholm working on the Star Wars games. Before that I used to work on mostly movie and commercials.

The idea was mainly to learn something new, which is almost always the driving force behind my own creative work. This time around I really wanted to focus on rendering in Arnold and working with Xgen, since most of my professional work is concentrated around modeling and texturing in one shape or another. Doing something like a primate would entail a lot of fur work and it seemed like a lot of fun! Workflow wise I made the skin and fur texture fully procedural within Maya which made the process a lot faster than relying on other software and re-importing textures all the time.

I think offline rendering and the time associated with that was probably the biggest frustration for me. Especially since mid-project I realized how bad my workstation had become since I bought it. But with that I learned a lot when it comes to optimizing renders and tweaking the settings in Arnold. Other than that it's the usual artist frustration, being happy with the quality, and being satisfied with the look and feel of the image.

Improving and striving to create content that I am happy with myself. I really struggle to be pleased with my own work. For this year I will really try to put myself out there more, create more content, and learn to let go and not be a perfectionist. I’m also trying to market myself a bit more, maybe release a few tutorials, do a couple of interviews and so on. Basically, start to build a brand around myself.

Oh, so many! Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Kris "Antropus" Costa, Rafael Grassetti, and Ian Spriggs, just to name a few. There are so, so many good artists out there now it can almost be overwhelming. To me the most important attribute for an artist is the ability to capture the spirit or soul in a character. And I feel that these artists really do capture the essence and what's important in their images.

Currently I am working on a few different personal projects. Right now, I am kind of on the fence on what to pursue next, I think that the interest is something that needs to grow organically. Probably what I am leaning towards is some sort of real-time character and I really want to try out Marmoset so something along those lines. Or maybe I’ll try to finish any of the projects I have lying around that I never finish. Time will tell!