My name is Adam Muratoff and I’m a Character & Creature Artist working in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. I live outside of Vancouver in Mission with my wife Jude and our 5 year old Senegal parrot, Pablo and commute to work by train (West Coast Express). It makes for a nice balance of “city work life” and “country home life”.
For the last while I’ve been working as a Character Artist on a new Action Title called “True Crime: Hong Kong” over at United Front Games for our publisher Activision. Here I’ve been Zbrushing high res sculpts of primary and ambient characters, creating topology or re-topologizing geometry to be “engine & animator friendly”, and creating all Material/Shader Maps including hand-painting texture maps.
Before coming to United Front Games, I was working as an Art Director and CG Artist at Reinvent Inc. for a few years, producing interactive 3D multimedia, motion design & video editing, 3D character and set design and mentoring/directing my fellow cg artists. We were working on a feature film pitch for Legendary Pictures along side some great concept artists from Weta Digital. We also had a sister company that was in development negotiations to produce Virtual Worlds… an open world MMO concept. Prior to working at Reinvent, I worked at THEmedia, a full service, interactive agency, producing 3D animations mostly for the medical industry, but not limited to. I grew a lot as an artist while I was there, working under the direction of artists with massive amounts of industry experience in block buster film and AAA games (some of whom now have their own successful interactive agencies). I think the time I spent there was when I learned the most so far in my career and developed as an artist. I probably crammed 5 years of learning into 2 years of actual time, working day and night… I was really inspired to grow and suddenly things just started to “click” for me.
I’ve loved art and music my entire life, so I could never picture myself doing anything else… this is what I was born to do. My introduction to the area of CG design was somewhat nontraditional in the respect I was a flash/motion designer at the time when I first got my hands on 3DS Max and fell in love with 3D. From there, my focus shifted 180 degrees from interface design and scripting to 3D and I learned as much as I could by producing my own animated shorts, and growing from my mistakes. I had responsibilities that didn’t allow me to take a few years off and go back to school, so I took the initiative and did what I could on my own and with the help of the online community. A few years later Zbrush arrived on the scene and again my mind was blown away with what I could do and what I might be able to do. I’m still a hard core Zbrusher these days and couldn’t picture my work flow and pipeline without it, especially with each new release.
Around the time I really got going with Zbrush, I got a phone call from Electronic Arts and they were looking for Character Artist to work on FIFA 2006 & NBA 2006 for the not yet released Xbox 360. I fell over, picked myself up, checked to see if anyone was still on the phone and said “yes please”. I quite my other job that afternoon 
. Again, I spent day and night learning everything I could from the industry vets around me. I have to say the people there were more than generous with sharing their knowledge and experience with me and I soaked it up like a sponge. I loved my time there and wouldn’t trade it for anything.
When I got into design, it was an interesting time in the industry. The first Playstation arrived on the market, 3D was just becoming slightly more apparent in the films industry and the www was still a fairly new thing… man, I’m probably dating myself here, but I’m not that old. Seriously, all these things happened within around the last decade. I was really interested in producing flash/motion design and taught myself that along with a bit of programing and worked at various interactive agencies for a few years before discovering 3D and getting my phone call from EA.
I know this is just the beginning and I view art as a life long pursuit and I’m very lucky to have had the opportunities that I’ve had so far. There is no end to this story and I look forward to adding on to this over the years. Anyway, that’s me, hope you enjoy my work and thanks for stopping by.
If you’re interested in knowing more specifics about my career…
