Melissa Buffaloe

Work History

• 

  Advanced Artist, World

  Monolith Productions

  June 2015 - Present
• 

  Senior Environment Artist

  Visceral Games

  March 2012 - October 2014

  San Francisco Bay Area

  My job at Visceral mainly revolved around world building and asset creation. I modeled and textured props including high res meshes to bake out normals, create shaders, and work with the designers to detail out our maps in DICE's Frostbite level editor. While at Visceral I worked on various titles including the Battlefield 3 : End Game DLC, Battlefield 4, and helped Danger Close for a few weeks to finish up Medal of Honor, but most of the work I did was for Battlefield: Hardline.

  

  
• 

  Senior Environment Artist

  Guerrilla Games

  June 2010 - January 2012

  Amsterdam Area, Netherlands

  My job was to take mockup geometry from level builders and lead a small team in fleshing out the environments of the various levels. When needed, I also modeled both high and low res props, painted textures, and created shaders.
  Titles shipped at Guerrilla:
  --Killzone 3

  
• 

  Environment Director

  UTV Ignition Entertainment

  October 2009 - June 2010

  Gainesville, Florida Area

  Whether it was through one on one communication with the in house artists or giving feedback and artistic training to the outsourcers on our forums, my job at Ignition was to help the artists reach the visual goals of our game. I reviewed individual assets, helped create pipelines and artistic/technical guidelines for our work, modeled and textured, scheduled artist tasks, and gave feedback on the levels as a whole.
• 

  Lead Environment Artist

  Treyarch / Activision

  January 2005 - October 2009

  Greater Los Angeles Area

  As the lead environment artist on Call of Duty: World at War, when I wasn't actually creating props and textures, a lot of my job was to give feedback to the environment team on individual assets, and to the build teams on the overall look of the levels. I was also responsible for polishing my levels before shipping including texture balancing, decal work, prop placement, and adding the finishing touches that helped bring the map to life. At the beginning of the project, I worked out a pipeline for the environment artists and researched new techniques for our team which really helped shape the end result. We also switched from Max to Maya on this project, so I spent a large amount of time getting the art team up to speed and helping to troubleshoot our tools integration with Maya. I set up schedules for each of the 7 artists on the team, and created props and textures for the levels I was assigned to.
  Titles shipped at Treyarch:
  --Call of Duty: Black Ops
  -- Call of Duty: Nazi Zombies DLC
  -- Call of Duty: World at War
  -- Call of Duty 3
  -- Call of Duty 2: Big Red One

  

  

  

• Lead Texture Artist

  Artificial Studios

  April 2003 - January 2005

  Textured models and levels for tech demos used to sell licenses for the Reality Engine which was eventually acquired by Epic
  Oversaw the remote team’s texture work for these tech demos

• 3D Artist

  The Film Foundry

  2003 - 2004

  Modeling and texturing primarily
  Layouts when needed
  Occasional animation
  Setting up and lighting scenes for print