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Environmental Artist / Level Designer and Writer

Name: William Terence Nicholls (Alias: Habboi)
Location: UK (South-East - Hertfordshire)
DOB: 29th April 1989 (21)
Current Occupation: Unemployed
Website: http://www.habboi.co.uk
Contact: williamnicholls@hotmail.com(Please use a suitable subject or it will be classed as junk.)

Looking for Work?: Yes
Looking for Internship?: Yes
Looking for Mod Work? No

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Education:

1. 10 GCSE Grades A-C.
2. 3 A Level Grades A-D.
3. Bachelor of Arts Honours Computer Games Design (Story Development) - First Class

Software Skills:

1. Valve Hammer Editor - (5+ Years)
2. 3D Studio Max 9/2011 - (3 Years)
3. Z-Brush - (Basic)
4. Unity Engine - (1 Year)
5. UnrealED - (Basic)
6. Cryengine - (Basic)
7. Crazybump (2 Years)
8. Adobe Photoshop CS2 - (4+ Years)
9. Adobe Director MX 2004 - (2+ Years)
10. Adobe Flash 9 - (1 Year)
11. Goldwave - (4+ Years)
12. All Microsoft Office Products - (8+ Years)

Ambitions:

1. To create assets for use in level environments. (Environmental Artist)
2. To plan levels and build basic architecture. (Level Designer)
3. To plan out games by writing design documents. (Games Designer)

Mod Work: A Citizen's View, Pipe Dream, Gang-Life & City 13.

Blog: Habboi's Blog of Games Design and All Things Awesome!

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Bio:

I'm a 21 year old graduate currently living in England. I previously studied Games Design: Story-Board Development at the University of East London and am awaiting the results in July. My interest in games design started when I first discovered Valve's Hammer Editor for the original Half Life video game series. From there I moved on to the upgraded version for the Source engine and have learnt to model environment props for portfolio projects. I also have experience with the Unity engine which was released on the PC platform a year ago. Finally I have minor experience with UnrealED and understand the design pipeline.

I also own a blog that has received lots of good feedback and got the attention of Brando Social who invited me to review two industry games as a journalist.

Those games were:

Battlefield 1943
Left 4 Dead 2

You can see the L4D 2 event here: Link And you can read my reviews here:

Battlefield 1943 Review
Left 4 Dead 2 Review

Finally I want to add that I am passionate about video games and devote all of my free time to either modelling or gaming.

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Portfolio

New Life Scientific Corridor



New Life Scientific Corridor was a personal project I created to improve my modelling and artistic ability as well as express my idea of what the future might look like. I personally enjoyed creating this scene and spent a great deal of work on the lighting. The scene depicts a future where a corporation that experiments in portal technology has fallen into chaos as their machine is malfunctioning. The scene has small hints that suggest someone was sitting on the sofa and filling in a form when they quickly got up in a hurry and spilt their water. The visual style was heavily influenced by two AAA games, Assassin's Creed 2 and Mirror's Edge. The scene was created in UDK and the skydome was created by Remus and full details can be found here: http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=603122 Also look at my blog which goes into detail about my design decisions: http://blog.habboi.co.uk/2011/01/new-li ... plete.html

Example UDK Map - 3 Days



This is a small level that I developed using the July release of the Unreal Development Kit to learn how the editor worked. I used assets that came with the editor and started learning things such as how to place models into a level and using lightmass to generate the lighting. Unfortunately these screenshots were taken in the preview box because my PC did not have enough memory to compile the lightmass at production level. I wanted to add more foliage and structures but the limits of my PC have prevented that sadly.

A lot of time was spent trying to understand why Lightmass kept failing. In the end I realised it was because my PC lacked the memory needed to calculate the end result.

Credit goes to the UDK team for the assets used in this level.

Wolf Game Project - Unity Engine



This game was created by a team of university students for the final semester. I was in charge of creating the visual style and managing the 3D modelling and had to give tasks for team members to complete. I also worked on the terrain alongside Matt Glanville using the tools provided with the Unity editor. The screenshots above were captured in the Unity editor resulting in a lower quality render.

Credit goes to the Unity Team, Matt "CrowbarSka" Glanville for terrain heightmaps and rock models and Kalamona (TurboSquid) for the Bear model.

1930's Bathroom - 3DS Max 9 Render



This is a render of a 1930's bathroom following the theme of "escape". The owner of the canary took the cage into the bathroom to clean out the bird excrement and to put in fresh newspaper on the bottom of the cage. After cleaning, the cage door wasn’t hooked shut properly and the bird forced its way out. The owner heard the bird singing happily and to his horror he saw that the bird had escaped from the cage and was sitting on the window sill. He quickly tried to grab it but it managed to fly out of the window leaving a few feathers on the sill.

Snow Wolf Project - Unity Engine



The aim of this project was to produce a 3D video game in the Unity engine that demonstrated a variety of industry standard techniques. The game included animated particles, biped and quadruped motion and dynamic shaders.

Credit goes to the Unity Team and TurboSquid for the Car Model.

Desk and Lamp - 3DS Max 9 Render



This is a simple render of my computer desk and lamp that I had to create in my first year at university.

A Citizen's View - Source Engine Modification



This was a Source modification where the player took the role of a citizen who was tricked by his friend and forced to join the rebellion. Along his journey he would realise how important his existence was in relation to Dr Freeman and the uprising of the Citadel.

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Miscellaneous



Please note that the Computer Monitor, Drink Can and Team Fortress 2 Scout Player model belong to Valve and the pictures show either texture edits or additional items that were attached to exisiting meshes.

You can read the development progress thread on the Scout items I created for the Polycount competition here.

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