Congratulations to Victoria Primmer from the University of Portsmouth, our winner of the Environment Art category in Search For A Star 2023!

Always one of our most popular categories, we had a massive 350 students signing up to take part in this year’s Environment Art challenge. Students were given two studio brief options, to either develop a themed scene incorporating a set of key props, or to develop a hard-surface vehicle project to a brief set by our studio partners at Cloud Imperium. Each had 4 weeks to create, document and present their projects to our assessment teams.

Victoria’s beautiful Autumn Water Mill project perfectly encapsulated the theme of “A shift in the wind”, wowing the assessors at the project stage and achieving one of the highest scores in the criteria for technical skill (you can check out Victoria’s project video below). At the final interview, Victoria continued to impress our judges with her excellent technical knowledge and artistic ability, earning her the winning place!

“I’m really happy to win Search For A Star Environment Art. It was an amazing experience to be a part of and the feedback I got was amazing!“

This year’s Search For A Star Environment Art challenges were created alongside our studio partners as a way of helping game design students to create a portfolio piece that showed exactly the type of skills that studios want to see from graduates starting a games career. Thank you also to our judging panel for the SFAS Environment Art challenge, Dan McCabe and Lloyd Jones from Cloud Imperium, Emily Dervey from XR Games, and Simon Hope from Aardvark Swift.

After Victoria’s interview, the judges shared with us the reasons behind their decision:

“Victoria was incredibly humble and leveraged the engine to its fullest potential over several disciplines. The results were staggering modularity that would allow colossal scale-up with eye-catching results. A worthy winner!”

Congratulations once again to Victoria, and we look forward to seeing a whole lot more from her in future 💚