game industry... questions
polycounter lvl 15
a few questions.
1.)for those in the industry, how did you get there? what did you do to prep yourself for it (mods...etc)?
2.)what school did you go too? did this school really have any effect on the outcome of you getting a job?
feel free to answer any questions that i didn't list but should know.
basically i am wanting to be an environmental artist for video games. i've been modeling for about a year and a half now, made some mods (jarrods texture mod for morrowind and oblivion), and am in the middle of making a game (logic-illusion.com). i am hoping that having a completed game would look good on my resume.
basically i am just looking for advice for going into the game industry. so any advice?
thanks!
p.s. currently i am 18 and just recently started college.
edit: my photobucket account , please note that the lower you go the older the stuff, and therefore the lower the quality.
1.)for those in the industry, how did you get there? what did you do to prep yourself for it (mods...etc)?
2.)what school did you go too? did this school really have any effect on the outcome of you getting a job?
feel free to answer any questions that i didn't list but should know.
basically i am wanting to be an environmental artist for video games. i've been modeling for about a year and a half now, made some mods (jarrods texture mod for morrowind and oblivion), and am in the middle of making a game (logic-illusion.com). i am hoping that having a completed game would look good on my resume.
basically i am just looking for advice for going into the game industry. so any advice?
thanks!
p.s. currently i am 18 and just recently started college.
edit: my photobucket account , please note that the lower you go the older the stuff, and therefore the lower the quality.
Replies
http://rsart.co.uk/?page_id=14
I'll try to seriously answer these before the thread descends into pokey-count-ness.
1) I was working at Atari in tech support, the company was down sizing left and right the entire time I was there. I managed to talk some higher ups into letting me install an unused copy of Max on my computer. Until that time I was using G-Max, UrealEd and Maya PLE to learn the craft. It really took off when I was able to learn max nearly 8hrs a day 5 days a week. I already knew photoshop pretty well from my previous job "graphic design". Read: putting pictures of cars in boxes and retouching real estate photos. I can't take credit for 100% of my learning many people took interest in my plight and showered me with knowledge. Some of them are here on this board
I do think the climate is changing and it is getting easier for self taught people to be over looked. Right now it doesn't really effect if you get in or not, but it does effect the amount of money they will give you. Note with a degree you have margin bargaining power but not much and for me the cost of a mortgage, 2 car payments and other varrious expenses of life were enough for me to strike out on my own with out the added burden of student loans. Once you are in and can prove how valuable you are they might throw a little bit more money your way to keep you around. With a game or two under your belt you can have that same level of bargaining power the degree gives you.
2) So its all give and take, I found that LOCAL schools take more than they give. However there are some really great programs out there like GuildHall, which I would enroll in a heart beat if I had the time, the cash and lived close. Since those planets haven't aligned just yet I've stuck to my plan and it has paid off.
The best advice I can offer, is make sure you know what you are getting into and what they will expect from you. If that doesn't scare you away, then work on having a great portfolio. How you get that portfolio, be it thru school or on your own, is up to you.
2) I'd go for a vocational degree combined with mod work in your spare time. If you want to be an environment artist, I'd recommend studying architecture, industrial design, product design, fine art, or something similar. There's two reasons for this. Firstly, it will give you something to fall back on. As someone else here said in another thread, the average game industry career lasts just 5 years, so having something else to your CV/ resume could help you later on. Secondly, most of the interviewers I know don't rate game university degrees overly.
Good Luck!
2)I graduated from San Jose State University's Illustration program. Because the school's illustration program was difficult to get into (only 24 students were accepted each year), it really taught me to stand out amongst the crowd. There was a constant competitive nature to the school especially during critiques - at least thats what it was like back then. Everyone tried to be the best they could be, because if you half-assed your painting/cg work/drawings, people could tell and it looked bad on you.
At my current job, we've been through several expansion phases where we've advertised our job openings and have gotten a lot of applicants and new employees through them. One of the biggest trends I've seen in many portfolios is the lack of focus. If you are an artist and you are going for an environmental position, I would suggest not showing any character work, or at least keep characters to a bare minimum. Likewise, if you are going for a character position, don't show renders of trees and foliage. It is better to concentrate on one type of art and be great at it than to be average at all of them - at least that is the mantra of many of my hiring managers. Getting into the industry is actually easier as an environmental artist, at least that's what I've heard. Apparantly finding good environment artists is hard to do - because it would seem there are more people going for the character positions. (I say this because we have a huge stack of character artist DVDs, while we have a very small number of environmental artist DVDs.) The one thing I rarely see in Portfolios is mood. Show your enviornments but definitely try to get a mood going. That always gets my managers talking about an applicant.
thanks everyone, there is some excellent advice in these replys and i'll be sure to take all of them to heart. Rick's site is very useful too, i mean he covers everything, its crazy.
saturnfive , what do you mean the average industy career last 5 years? and why is that?
and yes, with my game i recently aquired a character artist so i could concetrate on environments. i did this becaause not only is doing both a lot of work but so i may also do only environments and props and try to improve inthat area.
well, thanks for answering my questions, its much appreciated.
From there I just kept making more textures for characters, then weapons, pickups, then map textures, built maps, started selling them to people, made a website displaying them and slowly built up a reputation for it.
Eventually I had enough work done that I could send it to companies, then a company found my site, offered me a fulltime job, I took it and I just kept on working hard and learning everything I could.
I work at Epic now as a hi poly modeller making environments. I've never been to college and I've never read a book about making art or games.
I'm not the most technical artist, but I understand what looks good and how to research art styles and I work very hard for the love of it.
I think that work ethic and passion has taken me this far and will see me continue onward with confidence, I don't see why the same can't be true for anyone else with the willingness to work at whatever they want to do.
The trick is accepting that it takes time and understanding theres no substitute for working hard.
r.
Went to school at the Art Institute of Dallas for a year before dropping out due to finacial reasons and the fact that I wasn't learning anything anymore. Plus, they were training us there to work at places like DNA, which isn't a bad thing, but not what I wanted. Spent the next two years working very hard with my roommate making player characters for Quake 3 under the name Team Dallas.
During those two years, I ate, slept, and shiat 3d and 2d art.
Now I'm a senior character artist at Terminal Reality, and martinez is an animator (senior?) at Ensemble.
2. Took 1 college modeling course when i was in HS, went to college for 1 semester, dropped out, had to pay off my tuition for that one semester out of the sallary from my second full time game job... lol
Just enjoy it, keep making stuff, join a mod or something, but don't wait for people to tell you what to do, just do it, read tutorials, watch dvds, enter contests and practice. thats all it takes, now go
Don't let that discourage you though. If you want to be an artist, it *is* a cool job, I love being an environment artist and find the work is quite varied. I look at it this way- when things are really bad it's like a "normal" job. Most of the time I feel like someone is paying me to do what I'd be doing in my spare time anyway.
I'd also add: focus on improving your work as much as you possibly can, as the quality of your work is the key factor in getting you hired. A lot of the studios I know would make room for someone even if they didn't currently have a position available, if the applicant's work was impressive enough.
I didn't do a course in games, there were n't any when started, but I did have a degree in illustration , which helped me enormously.
if didn't have that grounding I would n't have developed the skills I needed later on when I turned to game art.
With all due respect I think suggesting having something to fall back on 'cos an games bizz career might only be 5 years is slightly strange advice to be honest.
Isn't that a little defeatist? If you want to be a videogame artist, you'll need to work damn hard on a portfolio and improving skillsets. If the career that you're shooting for has such a limited timespan then finding the level of commitment required to do that would be pretty damn hard imo.
Personally I went the route of illustration to game Art hobbyist to professional and never had any formal training in computer graphics. What Ruz said is noteworthy. Having a soild Art background will help you more than anything.
I'm approaching my 6 year mark and I'm asking myself if I really want to just do production art for the rest of my career. I think I want to spice up my career with some design.
As I said, that '5 year' figure isn't based on any empirical data, it's something I read in another thread here, so take it with a pinch of salt as you like. Personally I don't know that many people that have left the industry (though I've been fortunate enough to work for employers with a pretty good level of employee retention) the ones that I know that have left are mostly programmers- possibly because they have the most easily transferrable skills and potentially higher earnings elsewhere.
Since I changed careers from architecture to game development a few years ago, I've found the design / art training and experience to be invaluable pretty much every day in environmental art and level design work.
I know there is a texture artist in his early fifties and has been doing it around 18 years. I think you have to pace yourself though and not get burn't out.
Long term I would like to get in to the film industry, though if games goes well I will stick with it
A man has a to have a plan in life though:)
a question to those who may be thinking of leaving the games industry (or have already left) - what will you do afterwards? an art-related job, like illustration or design, fine art, or something completely different and unrelated?
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I was peripherally in the industry about 5 years ago, teaching low-poly modeling and developing a pretty successful mod (we got invited out to Valve, though no one on the team took a job), so I'm somewhat familiar. I found that while I didn't want to do games for a living, I had to do something both digital and creative - I currently work as a senior designer for one of the nation's best digital marketing companies (Bridge Worldwide) and still get to do a lot of 3D work along with interactive and 2D design.
The benefits relative to game development are very quick project turn-arounds, being paid what I'm worth relative to the hours I work, and little jeopardy of suddenly being laid off or relocated. The latter two are what really stopped me from submitting more resumes for game development positions back in '01; I like stability more than I do making low-poly art.
The downside, of course, is that I don't make games for a living...
So I wanted to get trained up and functional as fast as possible, so attended a 9 month Max course in '98. Moved to area where there were multiple job options (Seattle). Met someone at Siggraph that gave me my first 3d job in medical animation/video production in '99. Continued self-training/portfolio development on side. Got hired by local video/TV production house as 3d artist in '00. Started doing training for local 3d school in '01. Continued with portfolio development focused on game art. Got contract at Microsoft Games in '02, stayed there until '04. Wrote and contributed to several Max and Photoshop books between '02-'04. Did demo artist work and freelance training for Discreet, graphics card companies, etc. After Microsoft, immediately got another game art job at Valkyrie, where I'm still working today.
Anyway, I found that a move to film would mean a big paycut for me personally, but that was probably more due to how film tends to look down its nose at games than a true comparable salary. In other words, most cg studios and fx houses expected me to start at the bottom rung of the ladder again. Still, I dont see how working in film cg could possibly give one an easier life than making a videogame.
But yeah, I'd definitely be curious to hear more about peoples lives 'after games' as it were, and what kind of stuff they ended up doing. I dont see myself doing this forever either.
Moving into a smaller R&D firm or starting your own studio seem like common alternatives for seasoned gamedev artists.
I did the former, after about 9 yrs in game dev. Now I'm working on realtime3D military training apps (among lots of other things), and it's actually pretty fun to work on, if you set up the client right. And it makes decent money too, the govt can be a generous client. The art is challenging, the engine tech is not stagnant (unlike some other military sims seem to be), and the hours aren't crazy. My dream job, tbh.
I think the lesson I learned was, keep my eyes and ears open when examining a possible employer. Research them and their client base, due diligence paid off. Plus I got a really good vibe from these guys about where they wanted to go and how they were going to get there.
I consider myself lucky with my track record and as it stands will be doing this for another 10-15 years if I have my way.
there are sweat-shops in film just like there are in games. and sometimes those studios with the biggest names are not the greatest to work for. there definitely are joboffers besides the 60-hour weeks in gamedev (and film, of course!).