Student work by Diomel Chaves
An Environment Designer (or Environment Artist) creates the environments, backgrounds, and layouts of animated films, TV shows, and video games. They are in essence world-builders working off a design brief or script to bring an imaginary universe to life.
A knowledge of topography, architecture, cityscapes, geography, and landscape is crucial to the craft of environmental design.
In the video games industry, Environment Designers often correlate with Level Designers, and increasingly specialize in the complex task of creating the backdrop to a story.
They create mood, express style, and give context to worlds that characters inhabit. They also function to facilitate the many moving parts of an animation or video game.
The Environment Design element of 3D animation development is becoming ever more sophisticated as players demand more heightened experiences from gameplay, with some environments expressed as characters in themselves. The Environmental Designer imagines worlds that service the storyline and contribute to the immersive nature of the game.
The role of the Environmental Designer is to create the worlds of animated films, TV shows, and video games. They work from scripts, concept art, and design briefs to bring the backgrounds, layouts, and environments to life from abstract concepts and descriptions.
Their task is to build the interior logic of the world into their designs and visualize all the possibilities of those worlds for the characters to inhabit, presented in either 2D or 3D.
Expressing narrative through virtual landscapes and gamescapes is also an important part of the role. Environmental Designers are visual storytellers, infusing the backdrop with story or gameplay elements.
Role & responsibilities of an Environmental Designer in film, TV, and video games:
Environment Designers need to have a strong sense of perspective because a virtual world that is not immersive and true to reality will not work, jolt the viewer’s eye, destroy the suspension of disbelief and remove them from the story.
Environment Designers need to work fast to meet the requirements of the production pipeline, yet their work early in the project is vital.
Employers may look for the following skills in Environment Designers:
Environment Designers may do their initial drawings using mixed media such as pen, paper, ink, paint, etc but all final artwork is delivered digitally.
They will also work with various reference materials such as photography, geographical and political maps, architectural drawings, botanical elements, road structures, city planning layouts, etc. Some textures may be scanned from real-world sources and others created from scratch.
Environmental Designers may need knowledge of a combination of the following software:
The average salary of an Environment Designer for film and games ranges from USD $55,000 to USD $92,000. (Source: Glassdoor)
To learn more about this field, visit: What is Digital Illustration? or What is Concept Art?