Environment Artist Without Modeling?

badmoodbarry

Hey all,

Recently I've begun to dig further into materials and textures via Substance and I can't overstate how much I'm loving it. For the first time in the years I've been working various (non-art) roles within the industry, I'm actually feeling passionate and having fun.

I've considered the option of pushing for art-based roles in the distant future after I develop skills further, but I'm concerned that modeling may be required in some capacity for all environment art - that typically, one can't get away with strictly making and painting textures and shaders 100% of the time (and I don't currently have any care for picking up animation).

Do I have a tough road ahead by trying to strictly be a shader/materials guy, and I should either pivot to include FX or learn modeling - or is it actually standard for there to be non-modeling roles like this at standard AAA studios? 

Thanks for the help!

Brian "Panda" Choi

You have a tough road ahead.
Learn modeling or FX, whatever fits your fancy.
There are Texture Artist/ Shader artist positions, but they're rare.

Where's your portfolio?

oglu

I big studios ther are a lot of layout artists they never do any modeling. On open world games maybe there are more layout artists than modelers. Specially if the assets are outsourced. And there are substance designer only artists too. I know some layout artists they never opened maya or zbrush in the last 10 years they work only in the engine.

mikhga

There are material / texture artist roles at some studios (depending on size and workflows), which could be an area to pursue. If you are really passionate about creating materials my recommendation would be to, as an example portfolio piece, create a set of terrain materials and blend them together in your engine of choice. Or maybe create a library of base materials that 3D Artists could use in Painter on their props. Or maybe even try out Substance Automation Toolkit and see what use cases you can get out of that. 

What I think is important is to demonstrate in your portfolio that you can use Substance in real-world scenarios and not just to make "cool materials" that don't serve any real-life application in a production environment. 

Like Panda said, do you have any work to show? 

Good luck!

Meloncov

Wait, do you just not love modeling and don't want to spend dozens of hours a week doing it, or do you not know how to model and refuse to learn?

There are definitely Shader and Material Artist roles out there. I work in one. But you still need to know how to model. Some materials are best made by creating a high-res model and baking it. Often you'll find yourself needing to tweak a model to work properly with the material or shader setup you made. And sometimes you find yourself assigned a task that is mostly a matter of the right materials, but still requires making some simple models for in-game use.

poopipe

I lead a surfacing and materials department where on paper none of my artists do any modelling work.
Despite this  it's highly unlikely I'd hire anyone who wasn't  competent at least with regard to modelling and UVs.  The reason for this is that you have to understand how the materials and shaders you develop will be used in order to make them - the comment above about real world scenarios is absolutely correct.
The only way it'd work is if the candidate was very technical and was to focus on pipeline tools and rendering related stuff. 

You will find more specialised roles in vfx  - dedicated texture artists, dedicated hair combing artists etc..