20+ years building and leading character art teams across MachineGames, Arrowhead, Avalanche, Starbreeze, Fall Damage and Rebellion. 13 shipped AAA titles including the Wolfenstein franchise, Just Cause, Syndicate, and Helldivers II.
Specialist in realistic characters, production pipelines, and building high-performing teams. Experience spanning individual contribution, team leadership, and art direction. Equally comfortable mentoring junior artists, sculpting heroes and villains, or fixing the parts of a pipeline nobody else wants to touch.
Guest lecturer on game art, workflows, and production at PlaygroundSquad, Nord University, The Game Assembly, and others. Speaker at Promised Land Art Festival.
Now also on YouTube talking about art for games: youtube.com/@vidarrapp
Collecting hobbies and staying curious since 1984.
Working on an unannounced AAA title in Unreal Engine 5.7. Contributing across character art, pipeline development, and outsourcing supervision, and acting as a senior technical and creative reference for the project.
Joined to lead the Character Art Team on Avalanche's now paused game Contraband.
Got reacquainted with some old colleagues and got to take the reins on a great team, however the project fizzled out before we really could get going.
Character artist on the Enemies team for Helldivers II. Delivered enemies across all factions during the first year of live service, including the Factory Strider, Impaler, and Leviathans.
Menacing threats to managed democracy delivered as ordered.
Led character art direction and concept development for Alara Prime. Defined the visual language for the roster and drove the production brief for the character team on this esports title.
Built and led the character art team through pre-production and into production on Alara Prime.
Established working methodology and visual style from the ground up.
Led the character art team across the Wolfenstein franchise over a decade of production, during which the team grew from 2 to 5 artists. Day-to-day art direction, asset feedback, onboarding and training, outsourcing supervision across vendors including Airship Interactive, Goodbye Kansas and others, workflow design, tool development, and high-level production planning using Scrum.
Joined as one of MachineGames’ earliest employees and helped build the character art team from the ground up. Delivered character art across three shipped Wolfenstein titles, contributing to the franchise’s visual identity from The New Order through The New Colossus, with credited work spanning over 200 named characters across the trilogy.
Supervised the modelling team that delivered characters, props, and weapons for Syndicate (EA, Xbox 360/PS3/PC).
Created characters for Syndicate. Also served as Character Lead on a Bourne-license project for EA, handling R&D and outsourcing partner evaluation.
Character work on Shellshock 2 (PS3/360/PC), plus concept and pre-production work on several original IPs and pitches.
Joined on Just Cause, the studio’s first AAA title. Initially focused on quality improvement of outsourced characters and vehicles before being appointed Character Artist during development, with credited work including the main character Rico Rodriguez. Later led outsource supervision for Just Cause 2 and worked on pre-vis for the vertical slice, plus R&D on upcoming projects.