hunky robot

source: kotaku

Laura Dubuk is an artist and designer who works for Valve, where her most recent public work was her contribution to the studio’s terrific Meet the Pyro trailer. She’s also worked on games like Portal 2, and in this gallery you’ll see a collection of some of her best stuff, both from personal projects and from Valve games. If you like what you see, you can check out more of Laura’s work at her personal site. To see the larger pics in all their glory (or so you can save them as wallpaper), right-click on them below and select “open in new tab”.
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source: half-life

Living in downtown Seattle Washington, Laura is currently a visual designer at Valve Software. She graduated with a BFA in Animation, yet she quickly found her passion creating worlds and characters that don’t really exist.
During her schooling, she began her games career working on Half-Life 2 (2004) about The Coast level was described as follows: “When it came time to gather reference for the magnetic crane, i got my camera and a friend and i drove down to west Seattle where there are a number of them. For the crane interior, i used the inside of a bulldozer and the reference was complete”. Counter-Strike: Source (2004), Half-Life 2: Episode One (2006), Portal (2007), Half-Life 2: Episode Two (2007), and has since designed, modeled and textured environments for projects like Team Fortress 2 (2007), Left 4 Dead (2008), Alien Swarm (2010) and Portal 2 (2011).

She talks about their favorite character, Hoopie. Since it didn’t make it visually into the guide, here it is: “In the GLaDOS chamber, when you walk up to GLaDOS the first time you go through, if you look on the ground before you get to her there’s a ring. That’s Hoopie. He’s a character. His name is GLaDOS_Debris_05. At the end of Portal, when GLaDOS gets destroyed and all the debris come falling down, Hoopie lands in front of you and rolls. But he’s in Portal 2! We’re convinced once people know about him he’s going to be huge! He’s our favorite character.”

For Portal 2 she did most of the textures in the game. She did the initial white and black tiles and mostly environment stuff, like chapter 6 environment textures and real world stuff.

“DECORATING APERTURE” “This chapter gave us a great opportunity for visually telling the backstory of Aperture Science. We accomplished this with signs, props and materials. In this area, we get a glimpse of what Aperture Science must have been like in its heyday. We used rich, warm colors and materials like carpeting and marble to indicate that Aperture had a lot of money at one time. Cave Johnson and his staff were just starting out in their enterprise and everyone was eager to do science. This stands in contrast to the stark, cavernous environment outside and the materials you see in the Aperture Labs from later decades. As the player makes their way through more recent areas of the lab, the materials become cheaper, with an abundance of plastic and linoleum showing that Aperture had fallen on harder times and could no longer build high-quality offices for its workers.”

She moonlights as an oil painter, salsa dancer and rides around on her 1973 Raleigh cruiser.