(Image credit: Techland / Jan Buczny)

Some artists talk about worlds in terms of scale or spectacle, but 3D artist Jan Buczny, who worked on Dying Light: The Beast, where he "focused heavily on realistic material ageing and believable decal layering", will happily get sidetracked by a rock, or hundreds of them (he says in his ArtStation profile he knows '137 interesting facts about stones), and honestly, that tells you everything you need to know.

Now a senior environment artist at Techland, his route into games wasn’t the obvious one; he started out studying architecture but became more interested in where a building sits than in how it looks, the ground beneath it, and how an environment can shape everything around it.

(Image credit: Techland / Jan Buczny)

CB: Where did your artistic journey start?

Jan Buczny: My artistic journey began with learning to draw and studying architecture. At first, I was drawn to structure, composition, and the logic behind buildings.…