How vital is the knowledge of shaders
polycounter lvl 9
if you're a prop artist? This is still a very weak point for me that doesn't seem to be getting better. I assume if you're an environment artist you'll need to be well versed with creating shaders. I'm just nervous that this is a criteria that I won't be able to meet. Anyone else have anxieties or knowledge about mine?
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As far as your concern being an Env Artist. It depends where you want to work. Smaller studios require you to do more things. While some bigger ones have people specialized in specific things. Like just modelling or texturing.
Knowing how to do all of it makes for better understanding, and better execution of your art.
Some personal recommendations:
Sjoerd De Jong's tutorial or Tor Fricks Eat 3D tutorial or both.
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Yeah because they do not care about PBR...
For me, when I first started to learn shaders I found it helped me make better textures. Knowing how everything worked under the hood helped me understand how to make a material do what I want.
Really great shader artists are extremely rare so they are quite valued in the industry.
If you don't mind another tip, if I were you I would definitely consider a switch from Props to Environment art. In this day and age it's ridiculously hard to build a career doing props. It's way cheaper and prettier to outsource those so you might have a hard time finding a job or advancing professionally.
But yeah, If you don't know it, learn it, It's one part of the artist job
that is closer to programming thinking, and it's quite hard for some of us artists to get our head around it, including me, but even if it doesn't feel obvious and easy it first you can still learn it.
Graphics programmer: You should be able to write shaders by hand, with your eyes closed
Technical or effects artist: You should be able to write shaders by hand, or at the very least have a healthy understanding of node based shader editing
Lead/Senior artist: Depending on engine, you may end up working with node based shaders a bit, if you can do some more advanced stuff in a node editor so you're not bothering a programmer or TA, that is a valuable skill
Junior artist: You should know how to plug your maps into a shader, you probably won't be doing much or any shader authoring yourself, be it node based or otherwise, though you may make some basic alterations to pre-created shaders.
An environment artist may be more likely to whip up a custom shader than a character artist, as environment art often requires special shaders for blending between layers, directional based effects like snow, etc whereas character work tends to use pretty standardized shader setups for a given project.
All of this will of course vary heavily depending on engine/studio/art style/responsibilities/etc.
Every artist working on current or previous gen tech should have a solid understanding of basic shader stuff, like what a normal map is, specular, gloss, fresnel, etc.
either delve hardcore into UDK's material editor and create specific examples of what you're trying to achieve. it helps to write down what you're doing because you'll remember it for the future, and if possible, write down WHY you're doing it.
or,
jump into glsl/hlsl and learn the underlying code behind it all.
I agree with Andrew here, the knowledge you gain from making shaders yourself will help you so much in a studio-environment. Coming up with new and clever ways of dealing with things. That understanding is invaluable I'd say.
That said, expanding your skillet in a more technical direction i'm all for. it's what i've been doing steadily over the years. PBR just makes shaders specifically a bit more of a "do it right or don't do it" area.
Authoring shaders is becoming a more specialised job as more time passes from what I've seen.
With PBR I read in an article about 'Remember me' that large AO shouldn't be used, as when the shaders are applied it just blackens everything... However, micro details like cavity are still usable. Is this the case with next gen characters as well, removing the use of baked lighting or large scale AO and just using stuff like cavity? Had to ask as this work flow is relatively new to me. Cheers
There's plenty of threads to ask this stuff in, you should use on of those tbh. But in short; yes, for all art.
It's let me get in on tech/art R&D, got me some bits of freelance money from writing shaders and it means I can throw together a shader that does exactly what I want rather than having to use workarounds.
Even if you can't write raw cg/hlsl/glsl, I'd recommend spending some time with a node-based editor and seeing what you can get out of it.
It's not crucial to the job unless you're expected to write them, but knowing what the graphics card is doing with your textures (and knowing about linear/gamma lighting and the differences there) will probably help you when it comes to the big picture.
I don't know man, i think people overcomplicate PBR for no reason.
in the simplest possible terms, making something "physically accurate" just means making the shader energy conserving, right? So really, you could do that by just doing "diffuse * (1 - specular) = finaldiffuse". the bdrf just defines the shape of the specular highlight, there are already plenty of those described and while some can be quite complicated (ggx), you can also just use a modified blinn-phong. imaged based lighting is the most technically difficult part to get right, but you can even hack around that with a simple cubemap.
unless i've grossly misunderstood something somewhere anyway.
with that said, would you consider working with me sometime on making an "artist friendly" shader tutorial? just like, lambertian diffuse + blinn-phong specular, but describing what the math actually does in a way that artists will understand?
i think that could be helpful to a lot of people.
If you can prove you can use shaders with proper spec/gloss values, then you're golden.
BTW, PBR makes it a easier, as most of the shader values are given to you.
While it still isn't a make-or-break skill to possess, I would definitely advise looking into it. Unless the rendering pipeline doglegs hard in the near future, knowledge of, and ability to write shaders is going to be more and more valuable for game artists.