Congratulations to Tom Verbeeck from Howest DAE, our winner of the Environment Art category in Rising Star 2023!

Our Rising Star challenges work the same as Search For A Star, though are for students who are not yet in their final year of university or are at a college level. With 350 students signing up to take part in this year’s Environment Art challenge, it’s easily our most popular (and competitive) category. 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.

Tom created a wonderfully compact and stylised scene that showed a high level of both creative and technical skills (you can check out Tom’s project video below). In a very close final interview, Tom impressed our judges with his excellent all-round knowledge and great skills across creative and technical areas, earning him the winning place!

“I’m very happy that I’m one of the winners! I’m very surprised because there were a lot of other good applications out there from lots of other amazing students!“

This year’s Search For A Star Environment Art challenges were created alongside our studio partners as a way of helping game art 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 Rising Star Environment Art challenge, Craig Fowler from Dovetail, Max Spurlock from XR Games, and Connor Green from Aardvark Swift.

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

“Tom showed excellent lighting and composition skills to produce an amazing piece that fit the brief and alongside this, their presentation skills were great and could explain their project thoroughly.”

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