#weststudio

Sora Kim • "Prestige Ocean Song Seraphine - League of Legends"

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Concept for the FMP

As we come to the end of our MA degree in Games, Art and Design, us students are expected to create one final artifact, whether digital or physical, according to their own specialty. This final media project will be a reference upon which artists are to hone their craft based on their specialization.

Since, this is a very big project, I wanted to finish my degree with a bang. I have been very fascinated with the artstyle that Riot employs with their popular game 'Valorant'. They have a very simplistic artstyle which is very difficult to replicate and I wanted to take upon the challenge.

As for my final project, I have decided to go forward with reimagining a concept art in 3D. I love working as an environment artist and creating props and assets, designing levels, controlling the light setups and dictating the artstyle for my project is when I immerse myself deeply into this passion of mine. I decided to search up any concept art images released by Riot Games themselves hoping to replicate an environment and I came across this beautiful concept art from West Studio when they were collaborating with Riot Games during the initial pre-production phase of Valorant.

Figure 1 (Concept art chosen for the project, (Studio, 2020))

This concept art is so beautiful and has everything an environment artist would love tackling in their personal project. It also allows me to explore the color theory behind Valorant's environment maps and would also help improve my creative craft as an artist. Thus, after getting the seal of approval from my lecturers, I decided to reimagine this concept art in 3D.

REFERENCES

Pre-Production Documentation

I now start on the second part of the main brief assignment. It is for us students to start creating a pre-production documentation on what we are likely going to create for our final project. This will be geared more towards the specialism the students prefer to work in the future.

Since I want to focus on becoming a stylized environment artist, I decided that I would be creating a stylized environment artwork for my final project. I was more torn up between two really good concept arts I came across my research in ArtStation. One concept was to create a stylized ghibliesque environment in Unreal Engine and another was trying to reproduce a fan extension for an environment following a game's artstyle.

I found this really good initial concept artwork by West Studio who has hugely collaborated with the infamous shooter 'Valorant'. Valorant is a 2020 first person tactical shooter video game developed and published by Riot Games. It has a really distinctive color palette and art stylization and I would try to replicate it for my final project.

Figure 1 (Valorant, (Rutledge, 2020))

This is the initial concept artwork created by West Studio but during my initial research, I failed to find the existence of said artwork present inside the game world, save for a couple of assets they used.

Figure 2 (Concept artwork by West Studio, (Studio, 2020))

This is a really beautiful concept with perfect mix of architecture, foliage, lighting and stylization that really meshes with each other perfectly. I have never undertaken a project this big and as such, I want to be able to replicate this concept.

I will be carrying out my research on the concept above and also work on a couple of tests to make sure I have everything I need and I am well equipped to face this head on. The tests would include on variety of assets that would help my understanding on foliage, architecture, modeling, texturing, sculpting, lighting and even visual effects.

REFERENCES

Rutledge, C., 2020. The Gamer. [Online] Available at: https://www.thegamer.com/valorant-episode-ii-regional-leaderboards-competitive-rank-disparity-restrictions-update/ [Accessed 21 April 2025].