Vuk Spalajkovic

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 UV's, which most of are tightly packed on 1k atlases as shown below. Their poly count ranges from 100 to 3000.

Vendir: Plague of Lies - Faceless armor sets

This is an example of armors I worked on on Vendir, all of the pieces are modular and interchangable for male and female characters, I made their low poly meshes, UV's 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.

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).

General purpose PBR shader

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.

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

Roughness/Metallic sub-graph

Dissolve sub-graph

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.

Video showcasing the shader in action.

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.

I am Vuk Spalajkovic, a Senior Technical Artist with nearly a decade of experience in being a bridge between art and programming in game development.

Currently working at Three Swords Studio as a Senior Technical Artist since February 2024 on Heretical, a game released to Early Access, on which I am responsible for all things related to art-to-engine integration, 3D art, optimization of assets, rigging, animation, vfx, general tooling and development.

Previous work experience:
- Technical Artist at Early Morning Studio from April 2021 to January 2024 on Vendir: Plague of Lies until it's release in february 2023 and an unannounced project after that
- Technical Artist at Two Desperados from April 2020 to April 2021 on Viola's Quest and Woka Woka
- Technical Artist at Mad Head Games from January 2019 to November 2019 on Pagan Online(now named Pagan: Absent Gods on Steam)
- 3D and Technical Artist at Eipix Entertainment from November 2015 to February 2017 on multiple F2P games and Althora, a VR project published on Oculus(now Meta) Store
- 3D Artist at Endtimes Studio from September 2014 to October 2015 Created 3D models for a few VR projects: Plugged, Orbos 3D, and a real-time architectural visualization project

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