Career advice.

BucketOfNuggets

Hey everybody what's crackin? 

I want to get a job by the end of this year as an environmental artist and just wanting to know the best way to dedicate my time.

I work a salary job and have cut back my days so I now have 3 days off a week. So I'm going to be aiming for at least 30hours a week of solid work. 

I was thinking that I should aim to have one full piece completed a week or would it be better to focus on 2 or 3 major pieces for the year. What would companies look for. Smaller more frequent pieces would allow me to have a more varied portfolio but fewer pieces would in theory look a whole lot better.

I used to teach drums and would tell my students that there is a difference between playing and practicing and I have converted that to my 3D aswell making sure I continue to learn from tutorials while pushing my self on personal projects. 

My weaknesses without a doubt is texturing and lighting. For an environmental artist how essential is it to be great at lighting?

BucketOfNuggets

This is where I am at at the moment

huffer

I think you could get involved with an indie project (work for royalties), it's a good source of experience, you'll get to go through all stages of asset creation, learn to respect deadlines, take feedbacks, etc. After a couple of months you'll have something in your portofolio, as well as a project in your CV.

I also don't think small pieces vs large pieces matters that much...it's the art quality, and that can be spotted easily from a handful of stuff.  It's like applying for drumming for a band - should I play some small riffs or one long passage? If you have problems with keeping a beat it will be noticeable in either case. :P Also, try not to limit yourself to one week per asset, try to make it look as good as possible without regards to time.

skyline5gtr

Follow some of the excellent tutorials at 3dmotive or gumroad. That will kick start you right off 

beefaroni

My only advice that I repeat over and over is to do small environments that you will not get frustrated on. It sounds like you're in that mindset already, which is great.

When you are looking at a concept, really think about how much work you would need to do. Try to calculate how many textures you will need to make. If you've never made a wood floorboard texture before that could take a week itself to make something that's really convincing. Think about how many assets are in the scene. How many hero assets? 

In terms of your weakness with lighting that you mentioned. I feel that small environment will be quicker and easier to light. Good lighting can really make or break a piece. I think if you do small pieces you could have 4-5 really solid environments finished in a year. 

Good luck!

lefix

I would focus on the smallest possible projects, rather than large, complex scenes. Look at the level of quality of the companies that you want to work for and try to match that level of quality. 

Bedrock

I recommend doing a whole scene just because I find it tons more enjoyable and you get to show off/practice compositional, color and lighting and storytelling skills. It also makes for a more interesting portfolio = better chances at getting a job. But if you want to do single assets and never, ever work within the level itself then I'd just do single assets.

Use a real time engine to showcase your work (I recommend u4 personally, practice basic shaders). No vray/mental ray stuff.
Take concept art or a photo reference and work from that. Next, gather "target quality" references which should be the quality you are aiming for. This can be an existing AAA game or maybe the works of a talented artist. Sci fi? Halo. Fantasy? Witcher 3. Hand painted stylized? Diablo 3, WoW, Riot. etc.
Keep hammering at your work until it looks at least as good as your target. It can be difficult to see what's off sometimes so it's a good idea to post on Polycount and get more eyes on it.

Expect to do more than one iteration on an asset. I had to do a mountain piece for my latest work and it took me 3-4 tries to get a decent sculpt going (using completely different approaches to see what works best) and the texturing required a lot of back and forth as well. A lot of people just say whatever, put it on polycount, receive a bunch of replies saying how they need to start over and pretty much delete their accounts. Don't be that guy. Be the guy that's never, ever happy unless your work looks like AAA work. That's your target.

25h every week until the end of the year is a LOT of time. As long as you work as hard on your 50th week as you did on your first, you will be in the top 0.1% of artists.

+Eat3D has some good tuts too. Digital Tutors is good for just pure information (if you are learning new software), but their modelling/texturing quality isn't the best.

RaptorCWS

Like others have said I would focus on smaller scale props and try to get them to match the quality of a place you want to work at. Once you get to that point you can assemble a scene around them. but making  several environments before you are at the level you need to be for the place you want to work at  would be way more time consuming than making several small pieces that really focusing on what you need to improve on. If you feel like you absolutely must have a large environment i would suggest something that would re-use props like a casino. one slot machine, one chair, a few different kinds of tables. you will still have that big scene feel and you will be able to do it relatively quickly.  Just make sure each prop could be a portfolio piece by themselves.

It would not hurt you to be good at lighting.

BucketOfNuggets

Thanks everyone, there is some really solid advice here. I think the way I will hit it is by making small diorama style enviroments. For the first half of the year making sure they are all up to the absolute best standard making sure they show a good variety. Than the last 6 months I might aim a bit larger.

I just bought a tutorial at gumroad by an enviromental artist that worked on God of War. It looks absolutely perfect for what I want to do.

I can model very quickly but the texturing is what really slows me down so I will make sure the smaller scenes really focus on me pushing my self to perfect different material types in each scene.

In addition to rendering in engine, is there a reason that is preferred over multi pass render in maya and photoshop? Wouldn't it be best to show it off the best it could be or is it to show I can get it in engine?

Lastly does the polycount google hangout still work. It seems to fail anytime I try to connect.

slosh

I would start even smaller than a diorama if you don't have much PBR experience or haven't yet made an asset that hits current gen standards.  Maybe do a complex prop that isn't just a barrel or crate but still isn't going to be multiple textures so that you can have something interesting to look at that can still prove you have the ability to hit current gen quality.  I see a lot of env artists try to do scenes and they just don't look good enough because each asset within the scene is mediocre quality.  They get frustrated because the want to finish and it just takes too much time and motivation to bring it to the highest quality.  A single asset will gauge how efficiently you can create a high quality asset so that making larger props or scenes will be easier to plan out.

BucketOfNuggets

Sounds good.  I do see barrels and crates everywhere haha. 

When it comes to styles. I do appreciate hand painted assets and think they look great but I have no real interest in it. Should I work on being at least being competent in the field with one piece showing I can do it or is it ok to focus on just one style.

lefix

I don't know about hangouts, but you should also check the slack group

BucketOfNuggets

Awesome thanks mate, sent a request through.

lefix

double post

lefix

double post

BucketOfNuggets

I recently bought Quixel and I have been hammering away at it getting some good results while still learning and getting better. Some research though has shown me that the Substance packages seem to be more of a standard in the industry. Should I get stuck into Substance Painter and not bother with Quixel. I want to make sure my time is spent effectively learning the right tools. 

Thanks for any thoughts on this.

JacqueChoi

This might sound really tough to hear, but I think you might need to make about 10-20 more environments before your work would be considered good enough to land a job in the industry.

Focus on telling a story.
That first shot of a church is thematically empty. Make it a wedding celebration or something. Fill it with flowers, banners, rose pedals on the ground, and invitations sprawled over the floor. Do something to make it memorable.

Focus on replicating real-world assets.
Your windows are drab plain and boring.
I did a google search and found this in 5 seconds:


Classical Church Pews:

You should be doing a LOT more with the modelling.


Work on your lighting+composition:
Learn about staging, learn about composition, balance, etc.
Find out how to create a mood through lights, or tell a story.
What time of day is it? What season is it? Is it raining or sunny, or a stormy Night?





My Advice is just start making a new piece, and base it purely on observation and don't skimp on details. 


Make a street scene. Show cans of garbage on the ground, make sure the can has the label on it, where it shows the ingredients and barcode.
Make every single detail on that street, and make it a very specific street in a specific city.



Make more art!

BucketOfNuggets

Thanks for the feedback. I get what you're saying especially about the lighting and making it feel more alive.

The church scene I built for the Cerebus fan film and was asked to recreate the one from the comic. It was to be absolutely clean and holy. 

I have attached some shots to show what I had to make. Some one else will be doing the lighting and adding in the people etc.

I also attached an earlier render to show the back and side where the windows do change up.

BucketOfNuggets

That wasn't an excuse but my reasoning. Looking back on it I should have gone out of my way to try and expand the comic provided

JacqueChoi

The school I teach at, had a student project that won all kinds of awards, and Ubisoft even took a lot of the team members for a summer internship.
There were some pretty strong artist's that worked on this.

I don't want to throw them under the bus, but their award winning project looked like this:




The advice I gave the artists was to REMOVE it from their portfolios.



I've since expanded that advice to say
Never use collaborative game project/film work in your personal portfolio if it's made by a bunch of hobbyists or students. 

BucketOfNuggets

Yeah I think have spent way too much time working for others and not enough on personal projects that will further my skillset and portfolio. That's why I'm a little hesitant to join a new team over the rest of the year.