Fredrik Ortmon

Role: Senior Character artist at Avalanche Studios

Graduated: 2014

My name is Fredrik Ortmon, and I grew up on an island on the outskirts of Gothenburg. I've played video games for as long as I can remember, and made my first own games when I was 4-5 years old - by cutting up pieces of paper and drawing on them.

Game development, however, started to became real for me when I learned that there was a university education for 3D graphics, which I then applied for and got into - gscept. It was 3 years of fun projects and nice friendships with classmates. My focus during these years was to make 3D props for environments and scenes, in order to eventually get a job as an Environment artist.

My first job was at a small newly started game studio in Stockholm, where my first task was to make characters for the project - so it turned out that I switched to character artist and worked there for 3 years.

Today I work as a Senior Character artist at Avalanche Studios Group, a very fun position at a large company that has both small and large game projects, so there is a lot of variation. There is a lot of collaboration with other artists, riggers, animators and code to bring a character to life.

Communication between all disciplines is important in game development, so a tip for getting into the game industry is to be a team player, have a great passion and have the ability to see the possibilities for the virtual worlds you create.