Shane Caudle

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Shane Caudle
Laboral info
Birth details	1972.
Works at	Epic Games
Occupation	Artist
Worked in	Unreal Unreal Tournament Unreal Mission Pack: Return to Na Pali Unreal Championship Unreal Tournament 2003 Unreal Tournament 2004 Unreal Tournament 3

Shane Caudle is an art director, level designer, and 3D developer for Epic Games.

Bio

Born in 1972, Shane started making art for a living at the age of 17 (though he has been airbrushing since he was 12 just for fun). After a while he was offered a job at a company called Animotion, where he was introduced to CG. He then used CG for his own comic book series "Eye of the Storm", where he combined 3D rendered backgrounds with hand painted characters. During the creation of these books he also started making levels for games like Doom, Hexen and Quake. It wasn't long before he got multiple job offers, including one from Tim Sweeney. Tim sent Shane the tools to make a level using the Unreal Engine, Shane returned a level a few days later and got a job offer in return.

"I have been an artist all my life. I was always getting in trouble for drawing in class. When I was a teenager I got an airbrush, and fell in love with it. Once out of school I got a job in a large mall in Birmingham Alabama called the Riverchase Galleria as an airbrush artist. After that a friend and I started a company Called Rival Productions where we created a comic book called Eye of the Storm, that combined 3d rendered backgrounds and hand painted characters. We were using 3d studio 1, Photoshop and Painter. While working at Rival, we played a lot of FPS games, so I started learning the tools to make my own levels, using the Doom, Build and Quake engines. I made our office, as a Death Match level, and we would play in it and I would make a hidden room that had all the weapons in it, so I could go in there and load up quickly. When one of the guys found it, I would move it somewhere else LOL. All this level tinkering set me on a path to start making my own total conversion of Quake. I put up a web site for it, and within 2 weeks, I had 7 job offers to work in games. I somehow came across Tim Sweeney on an IRC gaming channel, and got to talking with him. He sent me a copy of the original Unreal Engine, and within 3 days I sent him a level back. They offered me a job, and I have been there for 14 awesome years now. I'm proficient in all artistic disciplines required to create games, so I get to jump around a lot on our different projects, where ever I'm needed most at the time - Level Design, Character Design, Modeling, Texturing, Cinematics, Tech Demos, Tools Design, UI Design. It keeps it interesting, as there is always something new to learn."

– Shane Caudle

Shane was originally brought in as a Level Designer for Unreal, where he did the flyby sequence, but his contributions for its sequel Unreal Tournament also include the creation of the flyby sequence, some of the game's maps, several of the character models (+ skins), soldier models (+ skins), pickups (+ skins), weapons (+ skins) and some elements of the interface and HUD graphics. His duties shifted even more during the creation of the 2nd generation of Unreal games, where he spends most of his time developing the Unreal Engine's tools and doing Art Work for the latest games. He also still makes game content, but it's mostly limited to models, such as The Corrupt for Unreal Tournament 3. Shane now works as Technical Art Director, balancing his time between making actual game content, trying new techniques to speed Epic's pipeline and creating/refining the many tools Epic uses to create their latest games.

List of contributions

Unreal

Flyby sequence Temple of Vandora Serpent Canyon Nali Castle Demonlord's Lair DmRadikus	Unreal: Special Edition: DmKrazy GW Press Addon: DmScruular

Unreal Tournament

AS-Frigate AS-Mazon CTF-Dreary DM-Conveyor DM-Gothic	DM-Tutorial Epic Bonus Pack: DM-ArcaneTemple

It's worth noting that both Gothic and ArcaneTemple are leftovers from the development of Unreal that were later "completed" and released for UT.

Unreal Mission Pack: Return to Na Pali

Velora Temple

Unreal Tournament 2003

CTF-Magma

Unreal Tournament 2004

CTF-Magma

Other

While all maps in Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict are credited to Epic Games as a whole, early during development DM-Conveyor was considered as a map for the game, two versions in fact: DM-Conveyor][ and DM-ConveyorArena.

Trivia

• Shane likes to favor the maps created with his own textures rather than working with already existing textures.
• When asked what's his favorite level in any game, he'll reply that he doesn't have any favorite. However, once he joked he liked DM_Octagon by Tim Sweeney which was just a test map with the default texture. He also wished Epic to get Id's own John Carmack so he could be paired with Tim Sweeney.
• Shane's surname appears in some of the signs in ONS-Urban.

Gallery

ONS-Urban easter egg.