Is material/texture artist even a job anymore?

ned_poreyra

There are so many materials already made, that I wonder if material artist is still even a job or is it just part of environment artist's duty. And if it is a job, what do they actually do? Even more rocks, wood and rusty metal?

Alex_J

i think if you look at poopipes post you get an idea of what sort of work is entailed with that side of things.  gets a bit more tech-arty, and presumably you eventually need to understand rendering implications involved.

poopipe

Yeah,  still a job.  Megascans has not replaced anyone . 

Alex is right - my lot are fairly technical and when I hire people who've done the job elsewhere they tend to have a similar skillset .  Theres variation of course - different tech, different leadership, different environment etc.all have an effect  but loosely speaking they sit somewhere between a texture artist and a tech artist.  

Meloncov

The thing about scanned assets is that they set a very high standard for fidelity that every hand-authored material has to meet. Eighty percent of environment textures might come from scans, but the remaining twenty percent are a whole lot of work.

poopipe

Nothing on megascans is any use without some (or lots of) processing. 

Unless you don't really care that much about your surfacing 

nOLpte8

I still see material/texture job art postings. Now granted numerically the number of open material/texture art jobs are probably on the lower end compared to other 3d art jobs but they are still there and hey if its of any comfort at least there are many more material/texture artist job openings than there are game writer openings... 

I will say though that the openings I saw want more than just being a pro at designer, photoshop etc... they also want maya and zbrush skills as well. Now I don't know if your modeling and sculpting ability has to be as good as a character modeler job but it seems you can't just be a pro in designer alone to get you a job. 

poopipe

Indeed - the material artist has to understand how to build models, how to handle UVs, have a decent grasp of what can reasonably be done in a shader and have a decent grasp of memory management.