How to communicate with art contractors?

Alex_J

Just looking for any tips or opinions here.

In past when working with other artist, I usually try to just explain goals for the milestone, guiding principles, and then leave the artist alone so that they can have the joy of independence and creative freedom.

This mostly doesn't seem to work except for with a few heroes. It seems that most people are not comfortable making decisions, or if they are it's unproductive because they didn't intake all the onboarding info I created. Or maybe just misunderstood. But result is needing to redo or scrap stuff.

I usually try to explain the guiding principles behind the art - like if it is a character, whats the characters role in story, or how does it act in gameplay. How does this character effect the players experience. Similar deal with environment art or even music.

Some people just don't seem to listen to that though - like it is extraneous info to them. They just want a concept to copy and hard technical specs. At that point though, I feel like it's more work to build all the info than it is to just do it myself, ya know? Like explaining to somebody precisely what to do is a lot more work than just doing it myself sometimes. If I have to define each step of the workflow it doesn't really save me time unless I'm talking about a huge scale (like this workflow would be used 1,000x by a team of artist).

So I would love to hear, what sort of responsibility do you expect from artist in different roles? How much leeway do you typically allow? As a contractor, whats the minimum information you need to complete, say, a character? What is the typical back and forth between you (as an artist) and your client? Like, do you expect to get a briefing and make the model in one go? Or deliver a quick version, get feedback, refine, and go through a process like that a few times?

If a client doesn't give you enough info, what questions do you ask? If they give you too much info, what do you ignore?

What does a good client provide you with? And what does a problem client fail to provide you with?

Any anecdotes might be useful. Just discussion questions, I realize all people are different and there isn't one true way.

zetheros

Alex_J said:

In past when working with other artist, I usually try to just explain goals for the milestone, guiding principles, and then leave the artist alone so that they can have the joy of independence and creative freedom.

while admirable, some artists don't work this way and would rather make things 1:1 from concept art. You may want to ask them if they prefer to do things with a lot of freedom, or want more guidance and boundaries to help them focus. If you require them to be more imaginative and independent, you may want to state so sooner than later.

Girding expectations might be something to consider when letting them do whatever you want, but I'm sure you know this. Artists are secretly mentally unstable people who use art to vent, it's the closest thing to playing sorcerer/warlock IRL

Also communication, this needs to be frequent unless you've worked with this artist before and you can trust them to self manage. And a new artist is going to screw up multiple times until they get things right 95-99% of the time, unless you pay top dollar for a seasoned veteran, and even then, unless you get really lucky, you'll have to expect and budget for a couple missteps until a working relationship is established.

If it's not the above, they might just be unmotivated flaky shite tier artists, or are young and are still struggling with ego issues, "but my art is awesome and your ideas suck, blah blah blah" lol

Fabi_G

Providing a benchmark asset that meets all your expectations for reference/comparison might help. 

As you already wrote, I imagine getting together after certain steps and discussing the progress would help to keep in sync and allow for adjustments. Steps could be something like blockout/pose/proportions (something to provide?), highpoly, lowpoly and textures. If the price is by asset, how iterations work has to be agreed on, to avoid arguments and one party feeling like they got the shorter end. Now and then checking in (got everything needed for the task? have any issues come up?) might help to reveal questions/issues/misunderstandings in between.

Naturally, working together for a time will reveal if one is on the same wavelength. In the end it's probably best to keep in touch with the people who are pleasant to work with.

Alex_J

Thanks guys, lots of great tips there.

I wonder if at studios it is common to have on-boarding guides such as this:

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/0688-7692-4D5A-1935

I don't imagine anybody could share something like that, but maybe? And would you use such a guide for workflow?

Neox

Alex_J said:

Thanks guys, lots of great tips there.

I wonder if at studios it is common to have on-boarding guides such as this:

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/0688-7692-4D5A-1935

I don't imagine anybody could share something like that, but maybe? And would you use such a guide for workflow?

pretty common, especially the bigger the project and the further into production it is. sometimes more sometime less in depth than is.

we've helped create things like these occasionally or even do the documentation for the clients to hand to their artists.

because not every production artist is a designer, nor wants to be, nor needs to be.

its good to touch base, but usually these things don't get updated all the way through production, so eventually it would really become an art bible, a book everyone quotes, but many people don't get. or stuff is already so dated, it shouldn't be followed anymore.

Eric Chadwick

We have some examples of art bibles 
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Art_Bible

Alex_J

Thanks guys, this is really helpful.

mawilbolou

I think the the more loose you are with limitations, the more varied the result will be.
and in most cases the worse it can be for your artist. Normally when a person is offering Creative freedom, it means
they dont have a clear, and broken down vision for the end result. 

Direction is key!

A production Artist normally needs to have as many limitations and stages of a model or scene, as you can provide in order to give you a quote and move through the process successfully..

Someone here said about a Baseline Asset, this is a good idea, and you should have a style guide or procedure that should be followed.
Good reference is a must. Once you have those, it can be given to any artist, they can budget their time and get you the result you want..

Alex_J

That makes sense @mawilbolou and seems to be the direction I need to head in most cases.