FilmVFX to Games career transition?

bneall

This is a question for people that have done it, or understand both industries well.

I'm currently a texture artist in feature film vfx, and I'm very interested in games. But I'm curious skill-set wise what is the best position too consider being new to it? All my background is in asset development (model, texture, shading). I feel like character artist or environment artist could to be closely aligned with this sort of work?

I'd love to hear some insight or experiences on the matter! Thanks.

BARDLER

Your skills will transition almost directly, and looking at your portfolio I don't really see any reason why you would have any problems switching to game art. The only thing you have to learn is the restrictions of texture resolution and polycounts, and how to bake normal maps to lower resolution geometry, if you don't know how to already.

The big difference between film and games are most studios do not have dedicated texture artists that are separated from the modelers. Naughty Dog is the only exception that I know of, and they have separate positions for environment modelers and environment texture artists. However, their character artists model and texture their characters I am fairly sure, but don't quote me on that.

Smaller studios are more interested people with multiple disciplines. So if you can do modeling and texturing for both characters and environment art then you become really valuable to a smaller indie studio. AAA studios look for more specialized people that fit into a single role of character art or environment art for the most part.

LRoy

The only thing you'd really have to learn is dealing with lower res limits. Maybe some rigging if you're not familiar with it? Your work is strong it wouldn't take much to switch.

Have you done stuff for gnomon? I feel like I watched one of your tutorials a while ago.

JordanN

Games are getting closer to FilmVfx, the line separating the two will look blurred in the future.

bneall

Thanks for the replies. I appreciate the info.

LRoy: I did one many years ago