The role Environment Artist & Level Designer at your studio
polycounter lvl 11
I'm wondering how standardized the division of labor is when it comes to "Environment Art" and "Level Design" across the industry.
If you have, or are currently, working at a studio:
How were these roles divided up? What are the expectations of a level designer and what are the expectations of an environment artist? How do the two positions work together to get the job done?
Edit: Just noticed this thread: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=52412
I suppose most of its addressed there but I'm still curious about how much this varies. It seams at some studios the roles are merged, while at other studios they are completely separate positions.
If you have, or are currently, working at a studio:
How were these roles divided up? What are the expectations of a level designer and what are the expectations of an environment artist? How do the two positions work together to get the job done?
Edit: Just noticed this thread: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=52412
I suppose most of its addressed there but I'm still curious about how much this varies. It seams at some studios the roles are merged, while at other studios they are completely separate positions.
Replies
Level Designer - Design the entire level start to finish. Block out the entire level in Maya using the most basic of basic primitive shapes to block in major landmarks needed for gameplay or vis blocking, areas of cover, and traversal sections.
They design the encounters, script the sequences, add spanwers, triggers, weapons and so forth. They work with a concept artist to come up with ways of matching gameplay layout around an interesting concept/idea.
Environment Artist - Split between 2 people for 1 entire level. Background Modeler and Texture Artist.
Background Modeler - Models everything in the level. Goes off the rough layout of the designer. Works with designer to make sure the flow of the level fits well for design in terms of readability and flow. Works with texture artist who textures all of the models they make.
Assemble the entire level, place all assets, create collision, shadow proxies (cheaper variations of original model for shadows) Responsible for keeping level within frame rate spec, and now for 3d spec. Responsible for keeping level within memory limit. Responsible for requesting and fixing all outsourced work needed for your level.
Texture Artist - Responsible for creating all textures and shaders used in the level. All textures are hand painted, generally done entirely in zBrush, no photosouring ( aka no cgtextures
UV and assign shaders to all created models. Responsible for keeping the shader count low as the is generally the biggest reason for drop in frame rate. Responsible for making shitty looking models done by background modeler look awesome!
Edit: Foreground Artist (aka prop or 3d artist) Creates props like weapons, vehicles, destructible assets and such.
Environment artists do almost all of the world building, including the first pass of effects and lighting, a lot of redesigning the blue rooms with more of an eye towards the architectural and artistic design, as well as creating all the architectural elements and props.
On the environment side, while every artists has certain areas that they excel at, everyone on the team is proficient in almost every aspect of environment production so any artist can step up and do any work that needs to be done. Artists are usually assigned a room to work on for a few weeks but everyone is continually rotating around and pitching in where work needs to be done, so lots of people will touch your room by the time it ships.
WHAT?! There is NO photosourcing? At all? None? Really?!
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That's... that's mighty impressive. I assume you use the AO and cavity maps baked from your High Poly sculpts, right?
Lord, if I see one more time someone using CGTextures and getting away with it that's not a student/college based first semester model, I'm going to punch a polar bear.
Environment artists always need to build props but how much world building/designing they need to be able to know/do varies.
In the future do you think the rIft between the two will widen, narrow, or remain highly depentent on both the studio and project? Its not exactly clear to me how the position is evolving as development becomes more focused and less fragmented.
are you serious? Then you have to punch alot of bears :P MW2 was like 50% unedited textures straight from cgtextures last time i looked, to name one. Almost everyone uses cgtextures or similar. Every game i have worked on have used cgtextures extensively. What is your problem with it??
I work at Cryptic Studios, and it breaks down just like Vigil does, as described here.
Really? I mean... REALLY?
But surely it's so much more time consuming to hand paint every single lit bit of a texture, when it would (more than likely) benefit to use CGTextures or some other photo-sourced texture source to get more material definition?
They use photoreference in Film all the time, dude.
I find ironic that ace-angel has the avatar that he has. lol
I know you could justify the look, but wouldn't that just take forever..even if your crew had amazing digital painters?
Condeming cgtextures simply because everyone uses is sounds the a retarded hipster attitude "cgtextures used to be cool before it became mainstream" its all about how you use your resources for the final result. if it looks good it looks good. that comes down to art direction and artist ability and time. time being the biggest factor usually.
Its more of our Art Direction. Uncharted is not a photo realistic game, its stylized realism. Using photos to create our textures would give us the wrong look. All our textures are hand painted to give that stylized realistic look but not photo realistic look.
Uncharted's style is not just in the textures but also in the environments. Everything is very cinematic, a little over the top. Things are kept in a realistic context but we push things a little to make peoples jaw drop. Using photos in the textures would make things look wrong.
Another reason we create our textures by hand is because we love Normal Maps
When you start with a high poly sculpt you will end up with fantastic normal map detail. You can also bake out AO, Difuse, Specular, Normal and a Height map. Textures are generally started with a sculpt and then polypainted. If you start with a photo of a texture you have already limited yourself. You will never get a great normal map out of that texture as you would if you started with a sculpt.
And its not an elitist view of "oh cgtextures is bad". Its just our art direction. I have no problem with cgtextures at all. I love it. What I dont love, and I think many dont like is that so many artists take a photo from cgtextures, apply it to a model and call it a day. This is the real problem with it. You should use photoscoured textures as a base, not as the final result. A monkey can apply a photo someone took to a model, and artist makes it unique, different, character and a purpose.
Thats my feeling anyway
Also yes hand painting textures at first would take longer but in reality I think it evens out for the most part. Using a photo you are locked to the detail in that photo. If you had a gravely road for example and you wanted to just move around some of the gravel it would be 100 times more time consuming and hard then moving around some rocks in a separate layer and then rebake your textures!
Also our texture artists are texture artists for a reason, its basically all they do. They dont have to worry about building a scene, placing assets and modeling crap.
I thought UC was "almost" 100% handpainted, because there are always exceptional cases.
thats the stuff that burns my ass, that and schools not taking production timelines into account for part of their curriculum at atll.
Here at EA visceral, the rolls are night and day different. So id dissagree with the above comment. Hell I know for a fact none of our designers even know how to model beyond primitives.
Environment artist: Creates art block of the level, then hands off a screen cap of the area to concept artist. Once painting is received, environment artist continues to model out the entire rest of zone. After done with geo, we go back and do materials. After materials is overlays, props, and general set dressings. In parallel to this, vfx, lighting and design are also jumping in during each phase to do a pass and update.
Typically an env artist can be juggling a few zones at once b/c of overlapping scheduling. Env artist is also respoinsible for all budgets pertaining to geo, textures, overlays, and depth.
Designers: They are in charge of creating the initial chain of cubes they like to call "rooms" =P after that Env artist takes over. They then move onto scripting, game play, bla bla bla. They do work in parallel with the env artist they are assigned. So if my designer has a "vision" of something, I do my best to create the environment around his/her idea.
oh and final note... Env artist dont do props unless its a glory piece. Any props we need, we send requests to management and they make china do it. So if your looking for a glorious job as a prop artist...avoid EA unless you like the idea of living in china and being pay faaaaar less
world builder and env artist are same thing for us. If it has to do with the visual asthetics of the environment, env artist does it. Size of area plays no difference.
Obviously if there is some sort of game play that requires env artist assist, designers give us metrics and we build around that. Then we work back and fowarth to make sure game play works while we art it out.
I attached a pic...mayb it will help illustrate. In the top one, I built everything except the broken down ship, and the ammo crates in the room. China did those. In the bottom one, i and another env artist did everything cept the corpse and canisters on the ground. So almost everything in the env, we are responsible for
I use Photos/Video/GPS/Common sense to Model/UV/Texture everything, then either vertex light or UV3/Lightmap all objects as well. I also have done AI splines for the cars, collision for the track, shader tweaking, bug fixing and making sure the track meets performance in all zones/areas.
We have design, but that is more for the overall feel I think, lighting direction and skybox work and whatnot. Although if the track isn't real, then they have a bigger hand in it, but it's more just concept art/ideas, and multiple track artists divide up the work and do it.
Yeah that ground is zbrushed/polypainted.
And your right, I shouldn't say EVERYTHING is hand painted, I should say ALMOST EVERYTHING.
I do punch alot of Polar Bears, the worst part is chasing them when they're chasing seals, damn those big white pillows can swim...and for those lacking saaaaarcasm, noooooo I don't punch Polar Bears, do you know how expensive it is and the long travels it will take me to do it? It's like asking the Moon to crash into us, give it up guys, your dreams of dieing a heroic death in an orgy is long over.
I, for one would like to die in an asteroid rain, atleast then I'll look over smuggly to any hippie-vegetarian-PETA member and say "So, how was all that saving sea kittens business going on?".
However, let me clarify something, since my brain is telling me to do so, I don't think taking textures and simply 'using' them is a bad base to start things, although I will still feel the need to cut myself, it's just that I find it in utter disdain and lack of self respect when any artist, who still has pubes, who doesn't even bother doing a simple color correction, or hell, even doing a custom shader for a vertex paint for said mixing of textures, other then running standard variables in crazybump, dumping them in the nodes and calling it a day to knock off for lunch and maybe knock up their girlfriend.
I mean honestly, and usually I lie alot mind you, on a daily basis, when modding with friends or trying to study a game, I keep on seeing straight downloaded textures from CGTextures, in which half of the time, the texures haven't been corrected in any way or form! No sir, no, they don't even take the time of day to download a large texture and tile it with the countless tools available for free on the interwebz, or even sign up an account, but hey baby, they do find the time to copy the browser image, and expand it by 200%, yes, because working is for pussies, and this is serious business, where CGI artists need to work on their pectoral muscles and get six-packs cowering Marcus Fenix! FNAR FNAR, RAWR!
I literally can see the dots in some textures as if they were super-sampled in the image size, but then again, I could be talking out of my hairy arse for all I know.
My point is, it gets tiresome after a while, and I simply get bored and vexed by it all. Also, how can any artist feel proud of what they did since they didn't do anything in the first place other then startup Crazybump? The instant I see another CGTexture slab on a mesh without even as much as color correction, I'll officially tear out my backsides orifice and wear it as a monocle.
Oh great, don't tell me Dr. Cox is a hipster too now?
I suggest that polar bear should do it!
Look at me I'm so badass and with my many years of game industry experience( 0 I'm still in school!) I feel it is appropriate for me to shit on any studio or person that uses cgtextures then act like a badass when people disagree with me. It's cool because the internet is anonymous though and I won't post my portfolio or linkedin profile because then I couldn't act like I was the bees knees. I pretty much feel very entitled for no reason which is why I think everyone would want to work with me.
P.S. Please actually do post your portfolio and prove me wrong I would love to see amazing work that completely validates you but I find that generally people that talk like assholes have work that comes from assholes.
Yeah, I think you got it wrong. Imagine you are working for 14h straight, for the 6th day in a row, you have half a level to texture, and you got almost no time to do it, are you gonna tell your publisher to fuck off while you make a nice custom texture for this door that you run past in a few seconds in the campaign, or will you finish your tasks on time, delivering a compete game? The reason why every single game is not looking GLORIOUS is not because artists that works on games suck, its because you have so little time to do everything. When crunchtime comes, iterating on minor things is not possible, sometimes you just have to let go of your dignity, and get shit DONE.
Yeah I agree, especially when you got designers coming around and asking to change everything adding days of extra work to the pile you've already got. As artists we can always spot textures from CGTextures or whatever, but then again only us game-devs will probably ever notice it. I mean especially me that have been working in the racing-genre for a year, you blast past the objects 200km/h there are some sacrifices you have to do and look at the bigger picture.
Saying otherwise and doing it "right" all the time just speaks of someone who doesn't know what it's like
- Making props or a small area of a map.
- Use existing material and rework it into a new shape to make an area of a map.
- Produce environment particle effects or background vistas.
- Polish up LODs, fix physics, optimise and polish.
- Add destructibility to existing assets.
- Fix daily issues and respond quickly to changes.
Tasks range from anything and generally move on after a week or even a day, sometimes even half a day.
But also taking into consideration I just finished the end of a project, so our process was more along the lines of... "SHIT GUYS! WE NEED TO GET THE GAME DONE!"
what we do:
Level designers do base block modeling with google sketchup. if level does not contain terrain.
Environment artist makes that blocks look detailed (environment artist does texturing too) do LOD/physic/lighting ... and export whole level from 3ds max.
Level designer gives level and put nodes, characters, triggers, blah blah blah.. and arrange all the gameplay received from programmers.
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one thing I've allways think of after I heard there is a person who only does texture painting in nauthy dog, was that "isn't it a lot boring to do only texture painting every day over and over again?"