My name is Niall and I’ve been an artist for as long as I can remember, but I only started making 3D art in 2013 when I was in College studying Game Development. We had to use Blender to create models for a game assignment and I got hooked on it. I primarily use Blender for all of my projects, and I would say I’m pretty good with it, although there are some things like Geometry Nodes that still seem like magic to me.

I mainly focus on turning 2D concepts into 3D models while trying to retain as much of the original style as possible through different shaders/materials. I have to get pretty creative sometimes when making my models as they all have different styles.

I originally only made props and a lot of hard surface things, but over the years I’ve slowly turned into a character artist, which I never thought would happen because my early characters were so bad. It all comes down to practice, because I make a ton of models in my spare time. I would say I model something almost every day, whether it’s modelling our house to plan out floorplans, or models for games that I have never released, or making bits and pieces to 3D print.

As mentioned above, I have a degree in Game Development, and have tried (and failed) to make dozens of different games. I’m great at prototyping, but finishing them is the hard part. I can make a prototype of any game idea in a few days, but it will most likely be very poorly written and it won’t be optimised, BUT it will work. It’s just the finishing and fine tuning stages that I’m not really bothered with, as I get bored of most projects after the prototyping phase.

As of 2024 I’ve started releasing more regular content on the Vertex Arcade channel where I make tutorials, process videos, challenges and all sorts of other 3D art related content!