Vuk Spalajkovic

Technical Art Portfolio

vukspalajkovic@gmail.com

3D & Topology

Vendir: Plague of Lies - Weapons

These are all the weapons I worked on for Vendir: Plague of Lies, my responsibility was their low poly topology and UVs, most of which are tightly packed on 1k atlases as shown below. Their poly count ranges from 100 to 3000.
Concept, high poly and textures were done by Nikola Matkovic.

weapons weapons weapons
weapons weapons weapons

Vendir: Plague of Lies - Faceless armor sets

This is an example of armors I worked on Vendir: Plague of Lies, all of the pieces are modular and interchangable for male and female characters, I made their low poly meshes, UVs and skinning, as I did for all other armor sets in the game, but I chose to showcase these as I personally find them to be the coolest looking.
Concept, high poly and textures were done by Nikola Matkovic.

weapons

Pagan: Absent Gods - Hector, Daeliblat Strangeman Skin

This is the skin for Hector I worked on at Mad Head Games for Pagan Online(now renamed to Pagan: Absent Gods). The concept, base model, rats, weapon, textures, rig and animations were done by my colleagues, my assignment was high-poly, low-poly, UV and baking for the armor and clothing, as well as the Scrap-O-Tron(the turret ability shown in the animation).
Concept art and texture paint was done by Boris Nenezic

lp
animation animation

Shaders

General purpose PBR shader - Unreal Engine

This is an example of an Unreal Engine master material that supports a variety of generally used features in the PBR pipeline and the ability to blend the mesh it is applied to with a Runtime Virtual Texture for seamless transition with the environment, using a custom height blend material function.

Shader Unreal

Height blend material function

Shader sub-graphs

General purpose PBR shader - Unity

This is an example of a Unity shader graph that supports a variety of generally used features in the PBR pipeline. A variety of such a shader was used for materials that can be seen in the 3D & Topology section.

Shader Unity

This shader takes 1 mandatory texture map as input Albedo, and Albedo Mask, Roughness/Metallic map, Normal map are optional. In case there are no optional maps provided, normals are generated based on the Albedo, while the roughness and metallic channels use 0 to 1 values instead. Dissolving, Normal Map's strength and channel flipping and Roughness/Metallic splitting are done in shader sub-graphs as can be seen below, as those are modules that can be used in other shaders in the project.

Normal map sub-graph

Shader sub-graphs

Roughness/Metallic sub-graph

Shader sub-graphs

Dissolve sub-graph

Shader sub-graphs

Face customization shader

This shader is used for face choices for character creation in Vendir: Plague of Lies. In essence it layers different transparent face parts over the main complexion one.

Shader 2

Video showcasing the shader in action.

Rigging & Animation

Quadruped rig

Example of a quadruped rig used on this monster.

Idle

Attack

Humanoid bipedal rig

This is a classic humanoid rig made in Maya with HIK and Mixamo which I find works very well for most humanoid animations that don't involve anything custom.

Tooling & Scripting

General Rig tools

This is a script written in Python using Maya's cmds library and PySide2.QWidgets for UI. It's built upon a BaseUI class that I made so it's very easily extendable to support other feature, here are just showcased different types of inputs that are supported.

Link to the code

UV Sorter tool

This tool was also written in Python using Maya's cmds library but UI was made with Maya's built in UI options without using a third party library. It's used to scale and move the UV's of selected object(s) and I find it very useful when having to custom pack some atlases.

Link to the code

Tutorials

tutorials

Figura youtube channel is my way of sharing my knowledge with the world, because that's how I gained it in the first place.
I'm happy that it reached 2350 subscribers at the time of writing this, and the comments by the people that find solutions to their problems through the videos is what I am most proud of in my career.

I believe that one of the most important roles of a Technical Artist in a team is to relay knowledge to others.

CV

Vuk Spalajkovic is a Senior Technical Artist with over 10 years of experience in being a bridge between art and programming in game development.

Currently working at Yarnhub on Brass Rain as a Senior Technical Artist since October 2025

Previous work experience:
- Senior Technical Artist at Three Swords Studio on Heretical, Feb 2024 to mid 2025
- Technical Artist at Early Morning Studio on Vendir: Plague of Lies until it's release in February 2023 and an unannounced project after that, Apr 2021 to Jan 2024
- Technical Artist at Two Desperados on Viola's Quest and Woka Woka. Apr 2020 to Apr 2021
- Technical Artist at Mad Head Games on Pagan: Absent Gods, Jan 2019 to Nov 2019
- 3D and Technical Artist at Eipix Entertainment on multiple unreleased F2P games and Althora, Nov 2015 to Feb 2017
- 3D Artist at Endtimes Studio on a few VR projects: Plugged, Orbos 3D, and a real-time architectural visualization project, Sep 2014 to Oct 2015

Education:
Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade
Bachelor's degree, Sculpture
2012 - 2016

Software knowledge:
- Engines: Unity, Unreal Engine
- 3D: Maya, Zbrush, Marvelous Designer
- 2D/Texturing: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Painter
- Code: C#, Python, Visual Scripting, Bash
- Source Control: Git, SVN
- Other: VSCode, Pureref, Marmoset Toolbag, Blender, Premiere Pro, Streamlabs OBS, Ableton