This is a project that I did a little under a year ago for my final year of my Undergraduate Degree in Games Design; a trailer for a game concept, which includes various environments and setpieces, modelled within 3DS Max, textured with Substance Painter & rendered within the Unity Engine. My skills as an environment artist have advanced far beyond what they were when I made this trailer, but its a project that I’m still more proud of doing than anything else you’ll find on my portfolio, purely because of the amount I struggled and worked to get it all done. Valanar is a fantasy setting birthed in 2015 by myself and my good friend Sean Skinner for use in our tabletop roleplaying campaigns, and has since sort of spiralled out of control and now I don’t even know what to call it – a franchise idea? I like to think of it more as a world, and to compliment the trailer is a lorebook I wrote and edited myself, by hand, in Adobe Photoshop. When creating the scenes for Valanar, I wanted to tell a story, and I figured the best way to do that was to make a lorebook to act as the backbone for it all, to give context to the scenes and ground them in a sense of time and space.
For now, Valanar remains confined within our tabletop games, a PDF and a 3 minute concept trailer, but one day, when both it and I are both older and more developed, I’d like to turn it into something much more.
Education
BSCH Games Design (2:1)
MA 3D Game Art (Still working on it)
Software Expertise
3DS Max, Substance Painter, Photoshop, Unity Engine, Unreal Engine 4, Substance Alchemist, Substance B2M, Quixel Mixer, Hammer SDK, Sony Vegas, After Effects, Office, C#.
About Me
My name is Connor Eric Noble, I’m from the coastal town of Hartlepool. I’m a 3D artist, I love modelling, and I first got into gaming, as many people in my generation did, at a very young age. The first games I have recollections of playing are Sonic Adventure 2, Warcraft 3 & Age of Mythology. I got a Gamecube at age 6, which I still own, along with my original copies of Tony Hawks, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, Timesplitters 2 & Super Mario Sunshine. Later I finally got my own Xbox, and between all of the car boot sales, birthdays, Christmases and trade-ins, I think I owned at least 10% of its entire library at one point. Of course, the value of all of those games crashed when the 360 came out, and I finally began to develop standards. I created my Steam Account in 2007, and I own way too many games to reasonably sit and complete. (Damn you, Steam Sales!)
I’ve played a lot of games. I love them, I love the people who make them, and I love people who love them too. I’ve called video games home when mine was in disarray. I’ve watched the industry grow with earnest, and I’m excited to one day get the opportunity to be a part of it.
But enough about that, I have other hobbies, too! Outside of gaming, I’m a very avid fan of Parkour, chess, old school anime, listening to audiobooks, photography, spending too much time making memes, posting said memes on Reddit, and technology in general. I have very fond memories of building computers and playing chess with my step-dad, who also got me into a lot of the anime I like to watch and re-watch today. I’m also a very big fan of competitive first person shooters; during my time in University, I got a taste for competing in a national University league for Counter Strike, where we placed top 10 in one season of NSE. I’ve played in & won various smaller LAN events, and while my fire for competing has been tempered by the cruel mistresses we call time and money, I’ll always hold onto my team jersey.
I’m also a HUGE DnD fan. One of my best friends, who I met in college, introduced me to the game around six years ago, and I instantly fell in love. (I now have a D20 tattooed on my forearm).
I’ve had a very keen interest in cinema and literature for many years, and provided I ever find the time, I’d love to write a book some day. A fantasy novel, based on my many escapades in Dungeons and Dragons.
