Character Art Games course, What do you want to know?
polycounter lvl 11
Hi All.
My Name is Ashley Sparling and I am a senior character artist at Ubisoft, I am currently working on assassin's creed odyssey.
I am looking to put together and Online course, but Instead of me juts putting something together I want to find out what you would like?
If you have a spare 2 minuets could you do this survey. You will be my best friend forever
It will really help me pin point the problem that people have when creating characters.
Thanks In advance
https://ashleysparling.typeform.com/to/M8t6IN
My Name is Ashley Sparling and I am a senior character artist at Ubisoft, I am currently working on assassin's creed odyssey.
I am looking to put together and Online course, but Instead of me juts putting something together I want to find out what you would like?
If you have a spare 2 minuets could you do this survey. You will be my best friend forever
It will really help me pin point the problem that people have when creating characters.
Thanks In advance
https://ashleysparling.typeform.com/to/M8t6IN
Replies
first off, someone with a high level skillset like a senior character artist isn't trying to make a quick buck because they work on assasins creed. They are giving up their spare time to teach others the skills they have spent years developing, and providing a ton of value, while providing context to why what they have to teach is actually relevant. and also probably helping cut junior's learning curves dramatically. heaven forbid they should expect to be compensated for their effort.
I know a lot of super senior people that actually have a hard time teaching because they have been doing it so long that it's hard to remember your initial sticking points and explain them because the process is just natural to them now. Look at someone like raphael lacoste doing a live demo or tutorial, hes always like, oh just insert this mountain and boom it looks awesome, while beginner artists are left scratching their head as to the how and the why. Asking for sticking points and specific problem areas that people struggle with is super smart because it tells Sparrow where to spend most of the time of the actual course/tutorial.
I could go on and on but meh. An interesting example of 2 totally different mindsets above, personally I'll root for the person actually trying to provide value. So while character art isn't really relevant to me personally, I'm a big supporter of the online teaching economy that has bloomed over the last few years and is making the old way of paying 20k a year for some shite art school and sham diploma go the way of the dinosaur.
Sparrow: Just make it the best course you can possibly deliver, give away a bunch free copies to get the word of mouth and some solid reviews and testimonials and then crank as much of your budget into instagram influencer ads and fb ads as you can to scale it up quickly, I wouldn't be surprised if for every dollar of adspend you do, you make 3-5 back. That would be my advice from a marketing perspective. rock on
@sacboi Thank you for your message.
To me that ranges from high poly modeling methods for specific problems (that can hopefully be extrapolated) to how to do hair. A lot of the rhetorical question for me involve "how do you maximize the use of Xgen" or "how do you use this rendered for this ONE task in the pipe?" or "how do you understand the rendering method of this game engine to juice the most out of the framework of this rendering method?"
My assumption comes from this idea that with those learned, it's just a matter of using those specific methodologies in an existing pipeline that a not-absolutely new artist could use.
Understandably, if it's an absolutely new artist, back to basics.
Some teachers are better than others, but regardless of how well any teacher speaks to me, I have a lot of gratitude and respect for all of the people who have, for profit or otherwise, made it possible for me to learn this awesome art/profession sitting at home and not even spending enough money to get my wife complaining about it.
Anyway, to the topic question, the main thing I look for in tutorials is that the author spends more time up front explaining what they are going to do and why. The actual doing -- that is just clicking keys ( though, I appreciate it if they callout the hotkeys just for repetition = memorization). But what so many tutorials do is they say very briefly, "Ok, i am going to make a _____," and then they just narrate what they are clicking, but you don't understand how the steps they are doing in the beginning relate to the final product 15 hours later. So if you just make a tutorial that covers your typical character creation pipeline, but you really break it down in a super succinct outline, and at the beginning of each section you explain in detail what you are going to do, why you are doing it, why the steps now are important to whats going to happen later... then you aren't just showing me how to move around in a 3d app, but you are teaching me the way you think and solve problems.
I am not in a position to be making tutorials myself, but if I was, I would try to explain how the planning I am doing before I begin blockout happens. I would explain before I even start modeling how I want to create a topology that will make UV'ing quick and easy later. There is a balance between explaining too much and too little, and that is where a well thought out outline comes into play, but the great thing about videos is you can always pause and watch them again. So info overload probably isn't a huge problem as much as not enogh info to explain the important planning going on.
If you are able to check out Georgian Avasilcutei's gumroad tutorials, I think he does a pretty good job of taking time upfront to explain the reasoning behind his methodologies. Being a less than one year beginner though, I'd appreciate some tutorials like his that were not time-lapsed, so that I can more easily understand things he is doing if its completely new to me. For instance, I am not well-versed in photoshop, so when he is working with complex layers to make some mask, it's almost impossible for me to follow along and learn what he's doing there at the low level. In the end I understand what is possible, but I have to go somewhere else to actually learn the tools to go back and mimic him.
On the other hand if you have done one of these character courses you see that there are a lot of different levels the students have and a lot of different interests (some want to focus on hair some on hard surface, most want to focus on everything within those 8-10 weeks XD ). There is a very legitimate reason to ask what people want most - especially before starting - to adjust the schedule. Since most of the teachers are working in AAA-studios they don't always have the time to create a whole project from scretch while doing the course, so preparations are necessary.
I also think that the typical course should focus on the whole pipeline - most people don't even know what they don't know and I have yet to see a student that didn't need to improve on every step of it. Within those typical 10 weeks you can get through the whole pipeline in enough detail that the students still get more information out of it than they can handle in such a short timeframe. More specific or detailed techniques like hair might rather require a course of their own, but honestly, looking back at Skutt's course I still have to learn from all the things he packed into it within those 10 sessions.
You might wonder, why would somebody shoot a rifle at something if you they aren't sure what it is? Wouldn't that kind of make them seem like a dumbass? I mean, just because you are in the woods and a bush shakes and you hear a noise, is that enouugh info to warrant blasting it with a high powered rifle? I suppose you can defend anything, but I'd say somebody who shoots without fully knowing what they are shooting at isn't going to convince me that they're a genius.
Interesting, but what does this have to do with what @carvuliero said?
@sparrow - Good suggestions here, one thing I would make sure is that students come out of the course with a ready character to game industry standards (like game art institute).
Also if you could talk about your experience at your current studio, and about what they expect in a character artist, would be a plus.
For my experience, and looking at other tutorials, ultimately knowing the technique is one thing, then its just practice and how quickly you eye gets trained to capturing silhouette and details.
Many students may come out of these courses with characters, but probably not with the fundamentals that help them tackle different types and shapes with sufficient speed. I think its important to emphasise this.
quick glance at OP's artstation (artstation may or may not be this persons up to date professional portfolio)= not knowing what the target really is
It's fine to critique other peoples stuff, that's like the main purpose of this site (at least it is for me). But to just straight hate on somebody after doing the lightest of research, perhaps because you are jealous because they hold a prestigious position you might feel you rightfully deserve, that is just bad form. Not professional at all.
Hey All,
I want to say thank you all for your support and your comments for a direction I can go in. I would like to say thank you to every one that took part in the survey, I have started to analyze it and I am seeing a reoccurring problem and topics that people want to learn more about. Everyones feedback and opinions will be taken into consideration.
Thank you all once again and it’s nice to see the community come together to push forward with learning and training.