Hello, ArtStationeers!

When we checked the calendar, we could hardly believe our eyes: today marks the 10th (!) anniversary of the release of Ori and the Blind Forest! A decade! Absolutely. Mindboggling.

As you may know, yours truly got to do the visual development and art production on the game, and it's been an important milestone in the team's history. We grew a lot as artists during the 4 years of development. General critical and commercial accolades aside, knowing that the game means a lot to many of you, too, warms our hearts to this day!

A large shout-out to the lovely members of the art team, and a big tip of the hat to the folks at Moon Studios for having us!

We did have a bit of celebratory cake in the office today, of course (Marzipan topping deco handcrafted by Johannes Figlhuber himself.) To honor the occasion we also added another artwork to our portfolio that was made for the dev team shirts way back. Enjoy!

Last but not least, how about an obscure Easter egg that probably only a few players ever noticed? Did you know that Johannes sneaked in a little homage to Laputa in the background? Well, now you do! Think you'll manage to find it? ^_^

Hello, fellow friends, peers, and game art connoisseurs!

As we're readying for the holiday break, it's once again time to reflect on the past and look at what's to come, isn't it? And, of course, there's the traditional final portfolio update of the year.

While there is a lot to talk about on the project side of things, one cannot be oblivious to the current state of affairs. 12 months ago we wrote:

It's been a great year for games, but, clearly, it's not been a great year for a good number of people who work on them. Chances are some of you are reading this. And if you've been in this industry for more than a hot minute and were lucky enough to dodge all this, you most certainly personally know someone who is being affected by lay-offs or just graduated and is struggling to land a job in this environment.

Sadly enough, pretty much all of the above also applied to 2024. Lay-offs and the looming threat of redundancies take a mental toll, and knowing that some people here experienced even more than one round of lay-offs this year and that many talented newcomers have a tough time breaking into the industry is disheartening. There's no sugarcoating this. And thus, we're hoping that 2025 will bring more stabiltity as well as incentives/initiatives for more support structures and sustainability.

Had 2024 been a less volatile year, you probably would be playing Project Dragon (aka Everhaven) right now. Alas, it wasn't meant to be. While that was heartbreaking, we were in the priviliged position to publish the art we had created for it rather than see it vanish into the dreaded IP/NDA vortex that most here are overly familiar with. Shout-out to the people who made this possible, and shout-out to the art team at Phoenix Labs that was an absolutely lovely bunch to work with. If you somehow missed that load of updates, you can dive into the goods right here as well as check out our respective blog posts. The response we and all the other artists got was fantastic, and it would be sweet to see this body of work inspire a few things down the road.

Other bits from the 'ICYMI' department: we got to show some of the 3D env/prop work we got to contribute to Palia (more to come), we posted our equally cozy 3D character & prop work on Fae Farm, and completed our Crash Team Rumble gallery. It was long overdue, but yours truly finally got the ball rolling on our 3D weapon work on Valorant (more to follow in January). Riot Games also let us show a first glimpse at some of the environment concept and 3D work we're doing for 2XKO.

Last, but certainly not least: 2024 marked a decade of us working with the Overwatch team at Blizzard. Mindboggling! We're still quite behind with our Overwatch 2 portfolio backlog, but stay tuned for more 3D character as well as environment concept & 3D drops in early 2025.

We're also looking forward to showing our work on games like Towerborne and Supervive and possibly talk about a project or two that have yet to be announced. Fingers crossed!

As always: a big thanks to this wonderful art community for all the support and feedback in the past year! A big thanks to all the terrific artists we get to work with! And a big thanks to all the splendid studios we got and get to colloraborate with!

(This year's holiday artwork was done by Vivien Siemers!)

See you in 2025!

Your Airborn Studios team

Greetings, everyone!

We'll look back at some of the work we contributed to Project Dragon one last time. If you've missed our the previous features on the concept work and the 3D env/prop assets we did, we suggest you check those first to have a better context for today's portfolio drop.

Project Dragon was a multiplayer sandbox action-adventure that was in the making at Phoenix Labs. Picture something like Minecraft meets Breath of the Wild sprinkled with some elements from games like Stardew Valley, set in a universe not based on any existing IP. We got to contribute a lot of concepts, 3D environment assets, props, and 3D characters work over the course of 3 years. Sadly, the game was canceled a short while ago.

While it breaks our hearts that you will never get to see Dragon (a codename, obviously) in its fully realized form, we're grateful that we are allowed to show the art we contributed, providing a glimpse at this wonderful and whimsical world that we loved to work on alongside a terrific team at Phoenix Labs that we loved to work with.

Today we shall set our sights on the 3D character work we did on Project Dragon.

When we joined the project, the internal 3D team at Phoenix Labs was still relatively small. Our first mission was to do a first benchmark character based on a concept by Nicola Saviori.

After another player character or two, yours truly worked on  few enemies to populate the build and have something for the players to fight against. Afterwards, a number of heads were on the menu so that the dev team had some material to toy around with for the character customization system they had in mind.

While the first characters were still uniquely built, the artists and tech artists at Phoenix Labs eventually devised a modular system to allow for the combination of different outfits, heads, hair styles and other faction-specific elements, and different body types among other things. The approach also made it very easy to modify textures and materials, so coming up with variants for outfits or creatures became another part of the workflow which the 3D artists had a grand time with.

What was the result like? How about we have a brief look at the character editor that the players could access. (Note: the videos were recorded from a WIP development screenshot, so scope, polish and UI/UX were not final in any way.)

When you check out our gallery, you'll largely 3D character assets of the following variety:

• Player outfits: a variety of general and culture-specific outfits the players could pick for their character
• Heads: same as above
• NPC outfits: outfits/looks for specific NPCs the players would encounter while exploring the world. They largely utilized the same system player characters were based on and didn't have the bespoke heads yet that you may have seen in some of the concepts. Those were yet to come.
• Enemies: well...
• Pets: by crafting specific treats, the players would have been able to tame pets! Most of which are mindboggingly adorable.
• Critters: smaller (but also highly adorable) creatures that the players could catch.
• Mounts: an assortment of (yes, adorable) creatures the players could unlock through quests to traverse the world a bit faster
• Oca: He's a special fella! Not sure if a character in an unreleased game can be deemed 'iconic', but that's what Oca would have been. And we were honored to do 3D work on him.

Please give it up for the team of wonderful 3D artists who did character work on Project Dragon on our end!
Andrea Orioli (Lead)
Florentine Postema (Co-Lead)
Chloé Labbé
Christian Fischer
Janneke Bruijnes
Levi John
Luc Narat
Malte Sturm
Nathan Bertelo
Steffen Unger
Theoni Fotoglou
Yuri Konoplov

It bears repeating, but the team at Phoenix Labs was an absolute joy to work with from day one to the bitter end. A special character-related shout-out and group hug is to be directed towards the great Josh Nadelberg, Lucas St. Martin and Megan Gritzfeld for their support and input, Adam Gibson for his tech-art wizardry that made many things easier or possible to begin with, Tanner Roberts, Danny Williams, the VFX magicians and the animators at Phoenix Labs and Funkeyz who completely knocked it out of the park. And Project Dragon was a treasure trove of fantastic and whimsical character/creature concept work for which we owe a debt of gratitude to Nicholas Kole, Camille Peyrebere, and Nicola Saviori among others.

Concluding notes

If you head over to our Project Dragon gallery, you see 3 years worth of vis-dev, R&D, and art production work. That would have been impossible without the helpful former leading members of the Dragon and ExDev teams at Phoenix Labs who made it their mission that former employees and partners would be allowed to show their work from Dragon and other cancelled projects. That's nothing to be taken for granted in an industry that is brim with buried projects as many of you will know only too well. For that, we cannot thank them enough. While you won't be able to play the game, you at least can get an inkling of the creativity and joy that went into it.

On that note: Project Dragon wasn't just a chunk of art assets, an idea on paper or a prototype at the time it was cancelled as some of the comments we saw assumed. It was a full game in its fourth year of development that even had an announcement date set when the axe came down on it and other projects at the studio.

Anyway, let's enjoy some delicious art, no? As with the previous features - below is only a tiny excerpt from the work we did. If you want to see it all, please head over here!

Oh hello, ArtStationeers!

If this is your first encounter with our work on Project Dragon, you might want to head over to this article first and then come back since our concept work will provide some context for the 3D work.

Project Dragon was a multiplayer sandbox action-adventure that was in the making at Phoenix Labs. Picture something like Minecraft meets Breath of the Wild sprinkled with some elements from games like Stardew Valley, set in a universe not based on any existing IP. We got to contribute a lot of concepts, 3D environment assets, props, and 3D characters work over the course of 3 years. Sadly, the game was canceled a short while ago.

While it breaks our hearts that you will never get to see Dragon (a codename, obviously) in its fully realized form, we're grateful that we are allowed to show the art we contributed, providing a glimpse at this wonderful and whimsical world that we loved to work on alongside a terrific team at Phoenix Labs that we loved to work with.

At the center of today's big portfolio push: the 3D work we did on props and other environment assets!

We joined the project in its early stages. At that point, there was no 3D Env Lead in Phoenix Labs' Dragon team, so our 3D artists went into vis-dev and R&D mode right away. One of our first missions was to build an early test location and explore the potential look of materials like wood, rock and soil while also checking potential approaches for grass and trees.

This was followed by a first beautiful corner to assess how well some of the early design ideas would translate. The results would help inform the world generation system to come.

(Concept provided by Phoenix Labs)

And then? Well, things just kept going, the pipeline was defined and refined, Project Dragon eventually transitioned into production mode, the teams on both sides slowly expanded, and we ended up doing a ton of environment assets and materials, a good number of which you can find in our ArtStation gallery now.

Our hats shall be tipped to the wonderful artists who were involved in env/prop work over the years on our end:

Frédéric Fouque (Lead)
Rodrigo Mizuno (Lead)
Álvaro Villanueva López
Axel Daboineau
Bart de Vries
Chloé Labbé
Dorine Laplanche
Eliot Velain
Ezgi Bulut
Florentine Postema
Jakob Gavelli
Malwina Czech
Mandy Waning
Marie Henry
Maxime Lecas
Nace Jelovcan
Rasmus Rye Thomson
Ricardo Sousa
Sasha Bernert
Tairo Fialho
Theoni Fotoglou
Valentina Mikhailava
Victor-Emmanuel Pancrazi

Much love the people of the Dragon team at Phoenix Labs, especially the treasured Art Director Josh Nadelberg, the ever-insightful Michael 'Orb' Vicente, Bryan Marony, Julien Allard, Andy Hansen, the amazing tech-art MVP Adam Gibson, all the wonderful concept artists who did such great work, Alex Newcombe, and the fine VFX ninjas. What a splendid group of people we got to be a part of! <3

Here's a small selection of the 3D work we got to do - please make sure to check out our Project Dragon gallery to see all the goods!

Hello, ArtStationeers!

Project Dragon was a multiplayer sandbox action-adventure that was in the making at Phoenix Labs. Picture something like Minecraft meets Breath of the Wild sprinkled with some elements from games like Stardew Valley, set in a universe not based on any existing IP. We got to contribute a lot of concepts, 3D environment assets, props, and 3D characters work over the course of 3 years. Sadly, the game was canceled a short while ago.

While it breaks our hearts that you will never get to see Dragon (a codename, obviously) in its fully realized form, we're grateful that we are allowed to show the art we contributed, providing a glimpse at this wonderful and whimsical world that we loved to work on alongside a terrific team at Phoenix Labs that we loved to work with.

The focus of today's big portfolio drop: concepts!

The 2D work you see in our gallery covers a wide range of work. We joined the project in an early stage in which visual development and world building was of utmost importance. Among other things, we developed concepts and key art for a variety of biomes/environments. Our artists even got to do some ideation for potential gameplay set pieces and player/environment interactions. Together with Phoenix Labs, we also explored how elements like trees, specific materials and such could work best in this voxel-based world.

As time went on, we honed in on specific environments, created props for factions and characters, did more materials exploration, and proposed designs for key locations, e.g. places that would be home to certain NPCs. In some cases this would be based on screenshots taken from the game, in other cases--when it was more about location design--we'd employ MagicaVoxel to create a base layout and use the result as our canvas.

Big shout-out and much love to the artists who contributed to this on our end:

Johannes Figlhuber (Lead)
Ilka Hesche
Maria Lobanova
Lisa Hein
Vivien Siemers
Inés Marsál
Vy-Kim Nguyen
Anna Sumina
Geraud Soulie

We can't speak enough words of praise about the Dragon team at Phoenix Labs that was always supportive and a joy to collaborate with. With regards to our concept work, we'd specifically and massively like to tip our hats to the reliably great Art Director Josh Nadelberg, Nicholas Kole, Charlène Le Scanff, Hyejung Lee, Michael 'Orb' Vicente, and Andy Hansen. <3

We will show the 3D environment/prop & 3D character work we got to do on Project Dragon in the coming days. Please also keep an eye out for art posted by other members of the now defunct Dragon team and show them some love. :)

Below a tiny excerpt - please head over to our Project Dragon gallery to see it all!

Hello, fellow friends!

As we are heading into holiday hibernation mode, we'd like to use this moment to tip that collective Airborn hat of ours and once again thank you for all the support in the past 12 months! Be it some kind words you left under a portfolio update or you recommending us to someone else - much appreciated! <3

Of course, a big group hug and much love to all the artists and teams we're getting to work with. Never not been a pleasure, never not been an honor, never not been a privilege. We got to show some of the work we contributed to Palia, Crash Team Rumble, Flood Rush, Overwatch 2 (now with some env/level work!) as well as some late additions to our Airborn Showcase gallery. Expect more Palia, CTR and OW2 goods in 2024, along with more Valorant weapon work, our contributions to Fae Farm, Dungeons 4, and a few other bits we have yet to talk about.

It's been a great year for games, but, clearly, it's not been a great year for a good number of people who work on them. Chances are some of you are reading this. And if you've been in this industry for more than a hot minute and were lucky enough to dodge all this, you most certainly personally know someone who is being affected by lay-offs or just graduated and is struggling to land a job in this environment.

Here's to 2024 bringing new opportunities

Your Airborn Studios team

P.S.: As is tradition, we're closing out the year with a fancy holiday artwork. This year's was done by our Lisa Hein!

Hello there!

As some of you knew or guessed based on a few teasers we dropped, a while ago we at Airborn Studios decided to stop by an old friend again. Rekindle an old love. Return to our roots. You get the gist. :)

What if…?

After a hibernation phase of five years, we made the call to revisit the project that our studio is named after. Wondering what it would be like if we dove back into that world with new ideas, a different approach, a mix of Airborn veterans and new team members, and the determination to use the latest technology to push stylized game art and stay true to the core pillars of the work that was done way back.And without further ado, we proudly present the result and won’t make you scroll for it!

From UT 2004 mod ...

If you’re not familiar with our history–and chances are that’s the case–here’s the Cliffs Notes version of that.When the first sketches and 3D models for Airborn were done…

• the Xbox 360 was fresh on the market
• the youngest artist in our current team was probably busy doing preschool doodles
• 3ds Max 8 (not 2008) and Photoshop CS2 were all the rage, and Autodesk had just acquired Maya
• UDK wouldn't be released for another 4 years, so UT 2003/2004 mods were the only way for hobbyists and small teams to work with Unreal. (And so we did.)

Yes, it’s been a while! And since then, we gradually iterated on and expanded the world of Airborn over time with a team of superb artists. Many of them are still a part of our team in one way or another, and some went on to do terrific work at other places. If you want to get a sense of how far back everything goes, feel free to check out our old album, this thread in the German DigitalArt Forum, and this one over at Polycount. The Airborn project was never officially put on hold, but other endeavors like Ori and the Blind Forest, Halo 4 & 5, and Overwatch demanded our attention - and that was even before the likes of Epic Games, Riot Games and Toys for Bob knocked on our door.

... to Unreal Engine 5

Still, we never forgot about Airborn due to the artist relationships forged back then. And to this day, people ask us about the state of affairs, and we regularly encounter some of that work in reference boards sent to us by clients. We set aside some time to go back. We made sure that most of the artists in the team get to be involved in some capacity at some point even if it's only for a brief stint. We took a bit of a gamble and employed Unreal Engine 5 right when it got released in Early Access. We made sure that Ian Dorsch is available and around since the music he had composed way back had become an integral part of Airborn, too. He brought along the fine folks of SkewSound to handle the sound design. Lastly, we reached out to Funkeyz Animation Studio. We knew their work from their contributions to Spyro Reignited Trilogy and Crash Bandicoot 4 and were happy to have them aboard for rigging and animation work on this one! We integrated a subtle clue to our undertaking into our Holiday 2020 artwork. And if you saw our Holiday 2021 artwork, you got an actual first glimpse at it - without knowing it. Sneaky bunch, eh?

We really hope you like what you're seeing. If you do, please go ahead, share and spread the love. Thank you! :) A bigger portfolio drop with individual assets will follow in the not too distant future. Oh, and we also reworked our website while we were at it. 

To conclude everything, some tips to the hat are in order. Firstly, big thanks to all the magnificent artists who worked on Airborn way back for laying the foundation and being an inspiration then and now! Legends!

Secondly, a massive thank you to the friends and peers who got to see WIP stages of the new project and provided awesome feedback! And thanks to everyone who has been around since the old days and kept supporting us!

Thirdly, a gigantic shoutout to and group-hug to everyone who worked on the showcase for knocking it out of the park. We’re super-delighted with how everything came together! Big round of applause for:

Airborn Studios
Alexander Delagrange - 3D Env/Prop Art
Alexandra Graap - 3D Character Art
Artur Rosário - Tech Art
Benjamin Sauder - Technical Director
Boris Patschull - Managing Director
Ching Rappsilber-Li - Management Assistant
Erik Neubauer - 3D Character Art
Fatos Tahiraj - 3D Character Art
Gabriel Hanna - 3D Env/Prop Art
Ilka Hesche - Concept art
Jan Wyss - 3D Env/Prop Art
João Sapiro Josue - 3D Env/Prop Art
Johannes Figlhuber - Art Direction & Concept Art
Jonas Kunert - 3D Env/Prop Art & Concept Art
Julian Dasgupta - Project Management & PR
Kevin Skok - 3D Env/Prop Art
Lennart Berger - 3D Character Art
Malwina Czech - 3D Env/Prop Art
Manuel Sitompul  - 3D Character Art
Manuel Virks - 3D Level Lead
Niels Timmerman - 3D Character Art
Simon Kopp - Art Direction & Concept Art
Steffen Unger - 3D Character Lead
Svenja Roesner - 3D Env/Prop Art
Tim Moreels - 3D Character Art
Verena Porcher - Website Relaunch Coordination
Victor Pancrazi - 3D Character Art

Music
Ian Dorsch

Funkeyz Animation Studio
Shuki Gamliel - Animation Supervisor
Sonia Wolfson - Animation
Arthur Kazine -  Animation
Michael Fabris - Rigging

SkewSound
Dan Crislip - Audio Director
Christopher Wilson - Sound Design
Nicholas Kallman - Sound Design
Steve Pardo - Sound Design

Production Babies
Joshua (Yoshi)

Special Thanks
Adina Krause
Ezgi Bulut
Josh Dina
Matthieu Schneider

Note: the development of this prototype was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Transport & Digital Infrastructure. Funnily and fittingly enough, the logistics of that were handled by the German Aerospace Center.

Hello, fellow ArtStation community!

There's a topic that's on everyone's mind this week. We're saddened, worried and dismayed by the news and footage that reaches us from the Ukraine, and we're anxiously reading reports from friends and peers who live or have family there, fearing for their safety and lives.

We discussed internally what Airborn could do beyond the usual means and decided that we'll make our office space available to Ukrainian game artists. If you're currently stuck in Berlin and can't travel home or happen to be in the process of leaving Ukraine and making your way here, we can offer a desk, hardware if needed, internet access, the usual facilities (e.g., kitchen) and the company of some fellow art weirdos (i.e., us) in case you need to place to go about your work during the day. Know someone like this? Feel free to pass this one. We'll also try to help where we can with bureaucratic obstacles one may encounter or seeing what accommodation options there might be. No hard promises on that though since it's a pretty dynamic situation and we're new to this as well. The best we can do under these circumstances.

What else can anyone do? Stay informed and take unvalidated news from sketchy sources with a massive grain of salt. More importantly, you can help by donating to organizations like the Red Cross and other channels. and engage with your local politicians to let them know how important this is to you.

To everyone who is directly affected by this: our thoughts are with you and we're hoping you and your loved ones manage to stay out of harm's way as best as possible.

Update: Adding a few resources and pointers here.

• Google sheet w/ housing & workspace options across Europe for Ukrainian game devs.
• If you want to offer housing yourself, you can use this Google form to add to the above sheet.
• If you can provide workspace, use this one.
• Ukraine refugee help Discord
• If you made it to Poland, you can use Deutsche Bahn long-distance trains to several cities in Germany for free if you have an Ukrainian passport or ID.
• If you come to Berlin and don't know anyone here or where to start, this might be helpful.
• Official Berlin info portal for people who arrive or want to help out
• Interior Ministry Germany FAQ: UA / EN
• Extremely comprehensive overview of info and ways to help across numerous countries
• Finding or offering accommodation for Ukrainians in Germany: Unterkunft Ukraine, Warmes Bett & Immoscout

Greetings, fellow ArtStationeers!

2021 was definitely a year that happened. For some it might have been the exciting start of a new chapter in their life; for some a rather undesired continuation of 2020. Working from home for a prolonged time isn't for everyone, and it certainly did affect our team as well. Whatever 2021 has been to you - fingers are crossed that things are moving into the right direction for y'all.

That said, we're happy to note that--regardless of the general circumstances--the team has once again grown over the past year and we were delighted to welcome some fresh faces to the HQ crew. It's also been a delight to see the office a bit more populated again throughout summer with folks who hadn't seen each other in months or actually met for first time. HQ is more or less back in hibernation mode now, but we absolutely cannot wait for it to be more practical, safe and sensible to have more artists in a shared physical space again.

Art, huh? 2021 saw more work on Overwatch (2!), Valorant (yes, that portfolio update is still due), Fortnite, Astroneer, Brawl Stars, Hay Day and such. We tripled our ArtStation output--in part also due to the massive Crash Bandicoot 4 drop--and yet we're still behind. We were also thrilled to see the announcement of the lovely Palia, which we've been contributing to for quite a while now. Going to be sweet to show some of that down the road! Same goes for the environment concepts we got to do for Soundfall. What else is Airborn up to? There are a few projects that we hopefully will be able to mention next year, one of which is already kinda out and available. And then there are those that are still in early R&D tinkering stages and probably won't get announced for quite a while. Exciting stuff though! Big shout-out to the treasured folks who keep roping us in for work and are just a joy to collaborate with.

The grandest of tips to the big 'ol Airborn hat goes out to all the artists out there! To those we have the pleasure of working with and who keep delivering delicious art nuggets. It's magical to see an amazing bunch firing from all cylinders. And to those out there who inspire us, push us, post kind feedback on the work we do, and recommend us to others. Thank you! <3

Lastly, as is tradition: our annual holiday artwork! Last year's had a bit of a hidden message in it. This year's, in one way or another, is more of a team effort than you might expect, and there's a story to be told here that we'll share early next year.

Until then: have a great time with your loved ones or doing whatever else you have planned for the next two weeks. See you in January!

Your Airbornians

Hey, fellow ArtStationeers!

Congrats to Singularity 6 for announcing Palia! You may have seen the trailer and some images yesterday - and we're happy to note that we have have been doing early rock exploration, a ton of house equipment, some larger pieces (e.g, the Blacksmith house and its interior) as well as prop concepts for over year now. It's been a sweet experience so far, and we're thrilled about how everything is coming together. :)

We don't have any portfolio material yet, but wanted to give a shout-out to the fabulous artists who do or did contribute to this on our end. (Hence a blog post.) Virtual high-fives to Benjamin Sauder (lead), Frédéric Fouque, Svenja Rösner, Jasmin Habezai-Fekri, Benjamin Sauer, Rodrigo Mizuno, Clara Soro-Bablet, Steffen Unger, and Jenny Harder (concepts)!

Also, big tip of the hat to the crew of Singularity 6 for having us and all the other wonderful artists working on this! Pre-alpha to launch soon-ish, so you might want to keep an eye on the official website or various social media channels listed there.