What's the most important for being a character artist?
Hello there, I've been learning character modeling for almost one year. I'm trying to find a job as a junior character artist now but I'm actually a bit confused.
My teacher worked as a character artist for 13 years (mostly in China), but he is now full-time teaching. What he always tells me is that the body figure and the face(correct anatomy for example) are more important than the clothes, the armors, the weapons. I'm doing my portfolio right now. I know that if I follow what my teacher said, It's gonna take quite a long time for improving because I don't draw well. (I'm learning drawing as well but I started pretty late) In my opinion, his saying is pretty reasonable because it's the essential difference between character artist and environment artist.
Well now I have a friend who is an environment artist working in a top game company currently. He told me that I can just download some human model online like Gumroad, and focus on doing perfect clothes, weapon armors. Since for the junior character artist, they can only do the basic models like clothes, weapons and armors. If so, it can be easier since I know getting to know well all anatomy knowledge is more difficult than that.
I don't know anyone who works as a character artist in a company. So I'm wondering for doing character modeling, what on earth is more important? Which part should I focus more for now?
Thanks!!
My teacher worked as a character artist for 13 years (mostly in China), but he is now full-time teaching. What he always tells me is that the body figure and the face(correct anatomy for example) are more important than the clothes, the armors, the weapons. I'm doing my portfolio right now. I know that if I follow what my teacher said, It's gonna take quite a long time for improving because I don't draw well. (I'm learning drawing as well but I started pretty late) In my opinion, his saying is pretty reasonable because it's the essential difference between character artist and environment artist.
Well now I have a friend who is an environment artist working in a top game company currently. He told me that I can just download some human model online like Gumroad, and focus on doing perfect clothes, weapon armors. Since for the junior character artist, they can only do the basic models like clothes, weapons and armors. If so, it can be easier since I know getting to know well all anatomy knowledge is more difficult than that.
I don't know anyone who works as a character artist in a company. So I'm wondering for doing character modeling, what on earth is more important? Which part should I focus more for now?
Thanks!!
Replies
I don't care spending more time on practicing to be good enough to be hired since I know it's a long-term thing, I'm just curious if I'm doing it wrong way. People tell me that working in a company is the most quick way to improve so I'm thinking if I can be hired , I can improve much faster. I think doing correct head and figure anatomy is the essential ability required.
That said this doesn't work for portfolios. If your anatomy sucks than you will have issues with proportions and faces - two things that get noticed immediatly, no chance to hide it from senior artists. Just putting up armors and clothing won't be enough to make an impression because there are more than enough artist that have full characters and if I am looking for a specialist than I will probably hire someone who already has production experience.
Learning anatomy is the biggest challenge, but it also improves your eye for details the most. Once you see the fine shape changes in a human body, its not that hard to learn to read materials and sculpt them at a higher level. So do full characters and always start with your own anatomy. You can use basemeshes as a starting point, but make sure you do the full body sculpt as a beginner to practice and learn. Even if its covered later by clothing and armor, you will learn whats beneath and better understand the clothing on top. This way you probably will hit the production level for anatomy and clothing about the same time. Still chances will be that you will be doing mostly clothing at the beginning of your career, but you will need the anatomy to stand out during recruitment.
As in if you were applying for a company that does children's animations, understanding proportioning and form to achieve a stylised/cartoony result may be sufficient at this point.
Most of these companies may not have the budget to accommodate a level of skill they clearly do not need, and it some cases their budget might be higher since they are well established in what they do and as a result you may have more freedom in your work.
It really comes down to market share at this point and their willingness to do the best with it for their hires.
I do know of artists that have been hired on the character team in AAA having a relatively early understanding of character anatomy, but an edge in making armour and clothing. It does happen.
This is because a lot of the hiring process also depends on what the company needs at the time, not all of which is listed in the job requirements.
Like one could easily assume that making a human character was insufficient, given that the company wanted creatures which they did not list in the requirements because their job listing was a cut and paste from 4 years ago to save time.
A good artist can adapt and learn quickly, and a good company knows the value of an artist beyond what is in their portfolio (life experience for example). Unfortunately a lot of this can be lost in the complex machinations of a studios day to day operations.
So it doesn't always come down to the quality of your work, but as an artist you must keep pushing your craft for yourself.
Juniors are just that : juniors. As in : they haven't had enough practical inhouse or self-driven experience to be exepected to operate at a senior level. But when it comes to artistic skill they are not given some kind of free pass - they'll be competing for the job with everyone out there, and there are some extremeley talented juniors all over the place.
Now of course some pipelines/projects have a need for some character artists to focus on gear only - and naturally, that sort of stuff will often be assigned to juniors. But thinking of this as some kind of low barrier of entry to aim at would be 200% misguided and is a backwards way to think about it. As usual, the only way to go at it is to strive to be the absolute best at the job, rather than to cut some hypothetical corners.
Lastly ... hoping to "pick up" anatomy and faces while on the job is pretty risky as imho it would show a certain lack of humilty in regards to the complexity of the topic. This stuff is pretty damn hard to get right, and while there will always be a certain amount of knowledge sharing within a team there is a limit to what one can learn by proxy - as opposed to putting in the work on one's own time, failing, and starting over again until eventually getting it right.
"He told me that I can just ..." is actually pretty condescending coming from your friend.
[This place inentionally left blank to insert a joke about environment artists
I agree with you, there's the possibility that a company only needs some who make perfect gears. I guess that's why my friend suggest me this way to try a quicker way (because I'm not very young ^^; He suggests me to find a job ASAP..) But I believe most companies want employees who have good knowledge of both anatomy and clothes making, or even more. I think I should be more patient and just focus on learning. Thank you!
Welcome to see my Artstation at that time if you are still interested!! Thank you so much ^^
Do you think in order to learn anatomy (or let's say practice our eyes) , figure drawing and portrait drawing can be more efficient than making character portfolios?
Yes I know that it takes a long time to learn to get correct shape of the human, I have friends who work on it for more than 2 years (part-time job in a restaurant at the same time) and does get a big improvement. He said the same thing that patience is also the quality required for this job.
This thread has a lot of interesting info.