How narrow can an environment artist's specialisation/focus be?

elios

Here to hear your opinions. 

What I mean is, to what extent, in your experience ,can you narrow your focus or exclude certain areas of modelling and asset creation from your practice, while still being (mostly) relevant in the industry. For example, can you focus more on a particular style or groups of styles and or aesthetics (ex. cyberpunk/sci fi in an FPS setting vs a medieval top down rts setting), subject matters (vegetation and organic, nature assets vs urban hard surface), and so on. Hopefully, you get what I mean.

From what I generally see online, it is more or less normal for studios, especially the bigger ones, to have certain people working exclusively on materials and nothing else, or have artists only do stylized work in their portfolio and nothing "photorealistic". I can also see that often people who showcase their work on, for instance, urban assets will credit others for the making the vegetation or things like custom destroyed versions of these assets etc used in the scene. 

Benjammin

You're asking two questions: Specialization of skillset, and specialization in production. Its fine to have preferences in what you like to make, but not so great if you can't step outside of that if needed. And, if you're in a production environment and you're the one person in the company who knows a certain workflow, you might end up specializing out of necessity. 
I was hired into my current role as a mostly hard surface prop artist. 3.5 years later and I'm doing a lot of tech art because I'm the one with the Houdini license. Another artist does 95% of our trees and foliage because they like working in SpeedTree more than the rest of us.

Ruz

Personally I would got for what you enjoy, not what you feel you should be modelling. If you have a real passion for Urban stuff for example
just go with it.
nothing worse that modelling stuff you don't enjoy( though it is sometimes necessary i guess)