How many employees are modelers in a video games company ?

Petitbateau

Hello all,

I have a simple question that I don't find the answer on google.

I'm looking for the percent of employees who is in a video games company. 

For exemple, on video games AAA like The Witcher 3, The Last Of Us, Red Dead Redemption, if there are around 500employees, how many of them are only modelers ? 10, 50, 100 ?

If you know how many modelers there are in Ubisoft, Rockstar or others video games companies this is perfect.

I just want to know if modeling is the essential part for a video game developpement or not. Maybe, in my exemple there is only 10 persons who make 3 objects a day by employee, you have about 6000 objects a year and that's enough ?

Thank you for the answer

Biomag

Five. That's the perfect number and it never varies. Each project is the same and has the same needs.


But if you don't believe that statement, you could check with the credits of games that interest you. I know they are quite boring to read, but IIRC they sometimes are split into categories by fields people work in or what they have done on specific projects. You could also verfy it by looking at LinkedIn to get an idea about roughly how many people work at a specific studio, though there are enough professionals who don't use it so the number is probably incomplete.

But at the end of the day, the answer remains five.

poopipe

Most of the assets for big name games are built using one of a few large outsource studios that are capable of providing hundreds of staff for a project.   internally the number will be much smaller. 

Turnaround time for an average set of modular props will be anywhere between a week and a month.  

garcellano

Roughly 8 Environment Artists here, 3 Character Artists I think, 2 Lighting Artists that were from the Environment Art dept, and a QA tester that also does character artist. Altogether, I think that's about 15 that model. Characters, props, etc., About 15 that can model, and probably more. I don't really check lol. I'm sure there are VFX artists here or animators that can also model.

Brian "Panda" Choi

HAHAH, "VFX artists here or there"

Meloncov

Very few people are exclusively modelers. At a minimum, an artist is generally also responsible for texturing their assets.

And no one averages anywhere close to three assets a day, unless they're creating variants of similar assets, or working on a game with a very simplified art style.

slosh

On ave, the percentage of modelers to the entire studio is very low.  And most studios aren't 500 people.  They will be MUCH smaller...even the larger ones.  Maybe teams like Ubisoft and Rockstar would have that many between multiple studios.  A lot of places quote larger staff numbers because of the amount of outsource groups also helping the project.  So of a studio of say, 70, maybe 6-7 are modelers...puts you at about 10% which I think is a safe estimation for an average.

Neox

slosh said:

A lot of places quote larger staff numbers because of the amount of outsource groups also helping the project.  

Yeah and those are usually specialized on certain tasks. We are about 40 people and only one is not a modeller right now. that might shift next year, but still it will be a ton more modellers than any other position. But we also do not overspecialize in like modeller, texture artist etc. we usually support full ownership of your own assets from start to finish.