Help, I'm an artist not making art!
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I've been a Character artist (professionally) for a year now. It may be that I'm in Australia, or it may just be the company I work for, but I'm expected to do pretty much everything to do with chatacters: rigging, skinning, animating, UE4 integration and blueprinting the relevant systems. I rarely sculpt or model (which are my strengths), and someone else does textures.
I'm an artist and I'm not making art.
Its made me wonder: Is this standard, or is my case an exceptional one?
Are there character artists out there that just do art, or is this a pipe dream?
Having a minor existential crisis here, so
I'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences.
Many thanks in advance.
(Feel free to ask if you need more info)
(Feel free to ask if you need more info)
Replies
I'm torn between staying and working on some really amazing projects, or leaving to try and pursue my goals.
But yeah if you hate what you're doing, strap on a parachute and head for the back of the plane.
I take it as you need to make some compromise, not slaving all the way. Yeah, like Eric said you could embrace it.
Thanks for sharing!
More input is welcome if anyone has more to contribute
As Eric pointed out, this is another job, and (from my experience) a quite needed one.
So if you actually like doing it, but just dont feel you are good at it, I think you should stick to it, or at least not cut it out completely.
It's difficult to give advice on
However, if you wake up every morning with suicide thoughts just THINKING about rigging, no one cares how lucrative it might be for you down the line.
And by doing this role, you will probably notice many common mistakes that character artists do and when you do yourself, you will try to avoid this mistakes.
But I have realized that maybe practice is what I need to get a hang of it. So when I can make out time, I would try to rig a generic mesh character from scratch completely and then do it again another time to lock down how to do this without tutorials. I intend to do this for facial rigging as well. I am trying to learn the fundamentals and be comfortable with it before trying out any serious projects or even animating (tried out 3d and 2d character animation in the past.)
I do archviz stuff which I completely love but I also want to tell stories too with archviz. So a photorealistic character moving around a house, would require all these things but I am learning it in phases. So I would encourage you to embrace it, it would help you in the long run. With this, you can pose your characters for your portfolio if you need to and also maybe make a short film or branch into another category in the future. But if you really dislike it, no need to do it.
Another suggestion, in your free time, try to make character art to keep your skills on point as you work in these other areas.
And Joe dont fret about the skill sets being different, the fact that your working in game development is a win on its own. Take what you learn and apply it in your own personal work. Always look towards your next opportunity and work in your free time towards it.
Just a follow up: I resigned from my job.
I'm staying on to finish off a project because it actually has character work, then I'm (hopefully) on to bigger and better things.
I'm really looking forward to having all of my time dedicated to making characters again, instead of the few hours I have after work.
Thanks again everyone!
Many artists hate this trend, not surprisingly. Some are fine with it. I suggest to people who look up this thread to keep in mind that if all you want to do is the pure 'art' side (by which I mean things like creating assets, sculpting in zbrush, doing concepts etc), that it's less realistic to get those gigs. The extreme competition for character artist jobs, combined with outsourcing of modeling and texture work means that it's a tough proposition, unless you have really top skills and/or lots of experience/seniority/leverage at your workplace.
If you just want to do the pure art stuff, AND you live in China or India, this is all fairly good news. For western artists, especially people just thinking about trying to get into the industry, it's something you need to adapt to (or deal with by spending more time finding the gig where you don't have to deal with the other stuff).
25 yrs in game art, now managing an art team in non-games art (architectural rendering, basically).
I am 100% of the time doing management at the moment, growing the art team, ramping the pipeline, cooperation with outsource team, etc. Was hired to do 50/50 art/mgmt. Still a ways off though haha.
Anyhow, I've been working on setting up 2 pathways for artist promotion... 1st is into more management-oriented roles (traditional growth pattern), 2nd is individual-contributor path (specialist, pipeline architect, mentorship, less management).
The latter is a harder sell to the company at large, where most promotions are based on taking on more and more management. There's a strong demand in my team for it, but above a certain point a specialist expert role becomes self-limiting. You can't really have a sole contributor at the same level as a company head or creative director for example.
At some point, adding management to your skill set is just inevitable. If you're ever going to work in a team structure, and you want more compensation.
Something to think about.