Mark Verkerk

Back in 2015 I helped out for a couple of months on the GoW:UE team to get the title out of the door. My work mostly involved content and level optimisations that alleviated the render thread and GPU a bit, targeting streaming hitches and occasionally keeping memory in check on the console.

Here are some of the more memorable levels (for me anyway!) who turned out to be a lot of fun to work on!

Caves and Viaducts were some great challenges. For Caves it was definitely the huge open caverns. For Viaducts it was fast vehicles causing level streaming issues!

In Timgad the river was completely filled in with rocks, debris, cars, you name it, it had it! Supposedly from a time before the water was changed to opaque. Makes for easy optimisations! delete, delete, delete!

Ofcourse, big shout out to all of the crazy talented artists who built all of this, and ofcourse the rest of the technical art team!

Quite some time ago I had the opportunity to create a red dot sight for Dirty Bomb. Although this was in UE3, before the PBR days I thought it had turned out well. Big shout out to Ben Garnell for expert feedback.

Although more recently I spend my evenings in C++, I started a little modeling project to build the famous Tiger IV tank.

Last week I decided to start a new personal project. Now after about a week of spending evenings I am happy to show it off in UE3

Some info:

9.500 Polygones

1024×1024 Diffuse

1024×1024 Normals

512×512 Specular

Today I finished the hulk auto soldier for troubleshoot.

Last week I worked on a new piece for my portfolio. Since my former pieces are mainly cartoonish I decided to try a more realistic approach.

The result can be viewed below.

Besides still looking for a new position in the game development industry I am currently doing some freelance work for Mirage3D. The work involves the creation of rigs and skins for their upcoming full dome movie “Natural selection“.

For the creation of these rigs I am fully utilizing and tweaking my former experience with rigging. Depending on how the model is going to be used in the animation I incorporate several features such as move-able mouths, tongues, eyelids and ears, individually move-able fingers and also advanced custom spline rigs, constraints and reactions.

For the last one and a halve year I have been working at Playlogic on the title Fairytale Fights.

Here I started out as a intern artist for 6 months, then during my graduation I worked there part time, and then they offered me a job as a junior 3D artist. In total its good for one year and nine months of experience. While working on Fairytale Fights I was responsible for creating about 30 fully new models, besides that I worked on at least a 100 more models (tweaking/ updating/ fixing).  My work includes modeling, texturing, rigging, skinning and making sure that the mesh ends up looking perfect ingame. This included all categories, so I made enemies, bosses, critters, hazzards, other gameplay objects and scenery.

Also during my internship I was required to color a concept art drawing although I had no previous experience with this sort of thing. After a short crashcourse with my art director (Robin Keijzer), this is what I came up with.

All of this work is copyrighted by its owner; Playlogic International

In the last year of my study I decided to team up with 3 other class mates to create our graduation project called ‘Realm of Synai’.

The project involved 2 animations (intro and outro) as well as a playable level in unreal. I made the project with: Liz el Saadany (2D artist/ animator), Jeroen horsman (3D artist) and Don van Straalen (3D artist).

The animations can be found on vimeo, here:  (intro animation), (the gameplay itself) and the  (outro animation)

In the thirth year of my education I learned to work with epic’s Unreal 2 engine.

With this engine a few others and myself made a small project called ‘unreal 4 kids’

Later around 2007 I learned to wield 3dsmax at the ‘Grafisch Lyceum Rotterdam’. To further extend my knowledge and planning skils I joined the speedmodeling competitions over at www.game-artist.net. Here you can find what I made of that.

With the last one I won the competition and so I decided to further extend that small scene.

Before I started my education I joined a hl2 mod called Off-limits (www.off-limits.be)

Altough I liked working on the level it never got finished due to educational pressures.

Somewhere around 2005 I learned to work with the hammer editor for half life 2. These scenes are a result of that happening.

At the first internship during my Animation & Games course I created scenes, models and animations for full dome video planetarium shows.

these models are all property of Mirage3D and are created by me.

The original Scenes can be viewed from the mirage3D website. Some of these have been made in collaboration with a few colleagues.

Nuclear Power Plant

Ice Age

Water works

Alma Dishes

Basicly the same as nostalgia 1,

I made this pieces between 2002 and 2007, ending up either unfinished, outdated or forgotten. And for some of these I am really sorry, back then I was in the phase where I just learned photoshop and thought the filters looked really cool.