Laura Dubuk

Laura Dubuk is a artist for Valve.

Biography
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, and has since designed, modeled and textured environments for projects like Team Fortress 2, and Portal2.

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

She talks about their favorite character, Hoopie. Since it didn't make it visually into the guide, here it is.

Here is the snippet from page 345 of our Portal 2 guide: "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.

"'Aperture Laboratories' was one of the initial sketches aimed at exploring what Aperture Science might have looked like at the height of its time in the 1940s. The image is a play between Aperture's grand ideas about Science and the anticipation that people might have had about its potential."

"DECORATING APERTURE"

"[Laura Dubuk] 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."

File:a labs lauradubuk.jpg

Complete gameography

 * Half-Life 2 (2004)
 * Counter-Strike: Source (2004)
 * Half-Life 2: Episode One (2006)
 * Portal (2007)
 * Half-Life 2: Episode Two (2007)
 * Left 4 Dead (2008)
 * Alien Swarm (2010)
 * Portal 2 (2011)