<--- I keep telling the story but I went back to IT, I wasn't into the move every 2 years for a game job lifestyle and never ending all consuming work on my portfolio to keep it up to par just in case I'm made redundant by the next milestone. I was pretty safe in my previous job, but I worked in Dallas and there weren't many companies out there. Not to mention there's a reason why the average videogame career is 5 years or less. Now I have spare time and can enjoy doodling again on my own time, and am now not as stressed out as I was previously. It's a hard gig, it's even a harder gig to keep once you've gotten the job. Younger, more talented folks are coming into the job market willing to live on less then you, and willing to stay longer hours while they do it.
This is all personal though, and everyone's story is. I hated art direction too, it's often vague and I just wanted to smack the folks saying, can I get that but make it more 'arty' or can you warm up that beige?.. 1 and 0's in IT don't lie.. it either works or it doesn't and it makes my life tons easier. I've actually been able to play some games now, which is what I enjoyed the most to begin with.
Good luck to you, and hope everything works out. It's cool to tell people you work at a game company, but it's not everything it's cracked up to be. (at least it wasn't for me)
Another tip/suggestion, that echoes what other already said: work harder on your folio. The piece that jumps out the most at me from your miniatures is the gun, and the pillar. You say the gun took two days to make? Its a weekend now, make another one!
This brings up another point I wanted to mention. Looking at portfolios I only ever want to see your max output. I want to see the best you can possibly do. I never want see an asset that is good "because"... "because I did it in 2 days", "because I used XXX technique", "because i limited myself to XXX specs". I only every want to see art that is good, because its the best you can do and its awesome.
So do not short change yourself on your portfolio work, you're not impressing me by giving yourself an unrealistic deadline to complete the work. Sure its a fun exercise, but IMO these type of personal tests aren't portfolio worthy. I have kept myself from saying you should keep X asset or drop X asset up to this point, because if you're working hard you'll eventually replace all the work you have currently, but because of the circumstances above, you will probably want to drop it.
Give yourself a realistic deadline, lets say a current gen, high detailed FPV weapon model, if you can complete this in 5-10 working days, you're working at an industry standard pace. Certainly its a problem if you're taking a month to complete the asset, you should be doing everything in your power to speed up your workflow, but doing in a gun in 2 days just isn't going to be very fruitful for you.
So I want to see your full potential is really what I'm getting at. If I want you on a project that has insane deadlines, corners are going to be cut and that is natural, but you shouldn't ever advertise yourself on that basis. You never want to be known as the guy who works super fast but does sub-par work.
I love how simple this industry is for the most part, ive had 3 interviews and im still jobless but at the core of it i just know i have to improve and eventually i wont have this problem.
maybe when i get really good the fact im an arsehole wont be an issue either
This brings up another point I wanted to mention. Looking at portfolios I only ever want to see your max output. I want to see the best you can possibly do. I never want see an asset that is good "because"... "because I did it in 2 days", "because I used XXX technique", "because i limited myself to XXX specs". I only every want to see art that is good, because its the best you can do and its awesome.
So do not short change yourself on your portfolio work, you're not impressing me by giving yourself an unrealistic deadline to complete the work. Sure its a fun exercise, but IMO these type of personal tests aren't portfolio worthy. I have kept myself from saying you should keep X asset or drop X asset up to this point, because if you're working hard you'll eventually replace all the work you have currently, but because of the circumstances above, you will probably want to drop it.
Give yourself a realistic deadline, lets say a current gen, high detailed FPV weapon model, if you can complete this in 5-10 working days, you're working at an industry standard pace. Certainly its a problem if you're taking a month to complete the asset, you should be doing everything in your power to speed up your workflow, but doing in a gun in 2 days just isn't going to be very fruitful for you.
So I want to see your full potential is really what I'm getting at. If I want you on a project that has insane deadlines, corners are going to be cut and that is natural, but you shouldn't ever advertise yourself on that basis. You never want to be known as the guy who works super fast but does sub-par work.
Yeh, Good Advice. But when it comes down to working within budgets and limitations, thats when a game Artist shows his true colors.
Ive seen so many Artists that can create great looking artwork, yet fall over themselves when complying with certain limitations.
A good example is from one of my environments pieces for a RTS console title.
500,000 tris for everything. 4km long City scape - no culling or occlusion of meshes - no instancing. Vertex Lit. Limited textures.
Personal work, released game title is so different. Its great to see both in a folio imo.
Yeh, Good Advice. But when it comes down to working within budgets and limitations, thats when a game Artist shows his true colors.
Ive seen so many Artists that can create great looking artwork, yet fall over themselves when complying with certain limitations.
Sure - but when you need to hire an artist for medium or long term, you'd rather bet on his/her artistic skills and eye instead of going for someone with a tendency to optimize the crap out of everything while doing artistically average work. It's all about finding the folks who know how to spend their time and ressources efficiently.
(the Zbrush kids having no clue about game art and hoping to be the next big thing are another case altogether...)
Sure - but when you need to hire an artist for medium or long term, you'd rather bet on his/her artistic skills and eye instead of going for someone with a tendency to optimize the crap out of everything while doing artistically average work. It's all about finding the folks who know how to spend their time and ressources efficiently.
(the Zbrush kids having no clue about game art and hoping to be the next big thing are another case altogether...)
Yeah, artistic skill, and useful production skills like getting clean bakes etc. Far too few people actually know how to do clean bakes, or cleanly define materials with texturing etc. I don't even really specifically look for people who are very talented artistically, or very creative, but people who know how to execute at a high level.
I'll take an artist that tells me "But this asset isn't going to bake well at XXX tricount" instead of an artist that just follows the tricount and delivers a sub par model with a wonky bake. If you get what i'm saying. Provided the artist knows what he's saying and is actually RIGHT of course. =P
We're at a point in the industry where technical restrictions shouldn't be a huge boundary to getting cool art done and in video games, so I don't think its really valid that I would need to look at portfolio's with this filter of "but he only had XXX" or whatever.
Maybe I'm going off a bit on a tangent here now...
This brings up another point I wanted to mention. Looking at portfolios I only ever want to see your max output. I want to see the best you can possibly do. I never want see an asset that is good "because"... "because I did it in 2 days", "because I used XXX technique", "because i limited myself to XXX specs". I only every want to see art that is good, because its the best you can do and its awesome.
.
Yeah, my point was more like: if you can do a gun in two days, you have no excuse why you are not making another folio piece, RIGHT NOW. If filling up the portfolio was a huuuge effort, that took months for a single thing to be finished, it would easier to make up excuses for yourself. Now there are no excuses :] Wasnt implyin that one should impose time restrictions etc when making portfolio pieces.
We're at a point in the industry where technical restrictions shouldn't be a huge boundary to getting cool art done and in video games, so I don't think its really valid that I would need to look at portfolio's with this filter of "but he only had XXX" or whatever.
And yet most games have large flaws, in their pipeline, in their art from a technical standpoint, etc. I think we are at a point where games are really pushing the consoles, so we put more and more effort on technical things when creating assets, so I know that when I am looking for an artist, i am always thinking of things like "yeah, but how would you turn this giant prop into modules so you can keep the texeldensity high enough on PS3" Very few artists show that they have any kind of technical skills needed in a real development environment, in their folios. So i definately think that kind of "experiments" have their place in a portfolio, stuff like "i made this entire environment with just 2 512s and 100 tris and still it looks good".
When I was putting together my graduate portfolio/reel, we were given a loose 2 week deadline for each piece and where alot of my coursemates tended to just take aslong as they wanted, I would always make sure each piece was finished for the deadlines (it was painful in some cases) but it meant that I got,
A) Faster, More tolerant of stress
C) Better with each piece made.
This being said I know that there are ALOT of things that I would/will do differently and every piece in my portfolio has problems, but doing a piece of work (ie a Vehicle/Collection of Props/Building) within 2 weeks as well as possible will mean that before long you'll have a big, badass portfolio that you can be proud of, and if you have to scrap something, hell its only 2 weeks work.
Making mistakes isnt necessarily a bad thing as long as you can admit you've made mistakes/learn from them. Hell if you can learn from the mistakes in your current portfolio than your next iteration will be much much better.
@ EQ, whereas I do consider your advices posted so far on this thread pretty valid, I believe you're projecting your personal experience and specific job a bit too much on there.
Game Art is not only making high polys, and the one artist that manages to bake an asset in less then XX hours is the king of the hill, and gets all the jobs.
You say you would hire someone with this specific skills to work with you, and I say you're just looking for another "you" to work with.
There SO much more to it, it's almost impossible to type it all down without making it look like a full blown article, but really bakes and shit is just one side of it, a technical side.
Game Art can be divided into a few subareas, technical, artistical and social.
Technical means, can you finish that asset within the given budget, LOD's, collision, good reusage of UV shells, texture res, poly count and within the given time?
Whereas obviously this is a very crucial and important skill, everyone can learn how to bake a cylinder without waving and all this technical mumbo jumbo, it's just following a set of rules and guidelines, and practice)
The Artistic one, not everyone has it. It can be achieved with a lot of work, some people are just born with the artistic touch on them, others dont, and you can be the most technical person in your team, but if you don't know how to make beautiful assets and keep your art director happy, you're just as fucked.
Finnaly, social, can you do well on a team? (No matter if you're working with outsourcing or on-site working with a team)
Are you a egocentric and pretentious person? Cos if you are, you'll have problems working on a team, and, you're just as fucked.
Having a look at the OP's portfolio, he still doesn't qualify for neither of the mentioned points. Still lacks on the technical field, I don't see anything that inspires talent, and judging by his own words, he still needs to learn how to become a humble artist, otherwise he will never grow professionally to the point where employers will even consider him.
"An artist is nothing without the gift, the gift is nothing without the work"
HP: Looking at the OP's portfolio, he seems to be interested in environment, hard surface and prop modeling. Giving him advice that would help him be a better character artist, game designer or executive producer isn't going to be very useful.
I'm looking for similar skills in him to that which I posses, yes, because he seems to be taking a similar career path. Certainly I am using my own experiences as a basis for forming my opinions, as everyone else in the world does too. If I felt my experiences were irrelevant to the situation, I wouldn't be here posting.
While everyone can be taught how to do a clean bake, it can be very painful needing to do this during production, as an industry, we should be beyond the point where every artist needs to be taught how to do a normal map bake. I mean honestly, there are so many resources out there if you just look. So yeah, anyone who has useful job skills like clean modeling, clean bakes, etc is going to be a more attractive hire.
Raw artistic talent is generally very important when looking for a concept artist. But when you're looking for someone who is going to create X asset from X concept(the vast majority of game assets...) its good to look for a guy who can simply produce. Not everyone is or needs to be that rockstar that concepts and designs all his assets and then models them as well, as this is very rarely needed in a production environment. Certainly some studios will require this sort of thing more than others, and as an artist you're more attractive the more you can do, but of course, only if you can do all of those things well. If you can do everything, but you're not good at anything, its going to be difficult, the industry is very specialized right now, so finding your niche' is definitely a good thing.
Now if you're just talking basic art skills, certainly this should be a requirement for any game artist. Luckily lacking basic art skills are generally very obvious when looking at someone's work, so it would be quite unusual to find someone who can produce very clean work, but lacks any sort of artistic understanding. Without understanding form, line, negative space, readability, color theory, etc, there is no way you're going to create assets that exhibit clean modeling and texturing.
TL;DR; I'm not sure where you get this idea that I've said the only thing that matters is highpoly and bakes or whatever. All I've done is talk about some specific skills that I think help an artist to get hired, I didn't write a list of ALL of the skills you need.
Yeah, artistic skill, and useful production skills like getting clean bakes etc. Far too few people actually know how to do clean bakes, or cleanly define materials with texturing etc. I don't even really specifically look for people who are very talented artistically, or very creative, but people who know how to execute at a high level.
What i'm saying here is NOT technical skill > artistic skill, but instead that someone who is competent both artistically and technically and can pull it all together and make a finished product, is going to make a more attractive hire over someone who just has a lot of raw talent, but hasn't really translated that into real assets before.
This applies to character artists, concept artists(concept artists need to understand perspective, 3d, how things will animate, far too few really do!), environment artists, etc etc.
Speaking of specialization, I'm seeing a lot of kids coming out that do sweet bakes with photorealistic textures but can't paint at all. Hand painted work is practically the whole MMO and mobile gaming market. I'd hazard to guess that's half or more of all the jobs out there, since MMO's have armies of in house and outsourced artists creating assets.
Seaseme, if you're looking for direction a good place to start would be the front page of polycount. you made a gun so ill use the brink guns as an example, make a new gun, and make sure its better then the 1s you see on front page.
while working remember this, you cant just say "its good enough" and move on, it has to be the very best you could have done, and every next time you model that bar should be higher.
If you work on a project like lego, you might enjoy it and find it challenging and all that, but you have to know that it isn't going to give you portfolio quality work that will get you hired at a AAA studio. You simply aren't going to have work (and skills) that are AAA quality. You can't just throw up a portfolio with lego work and pretend that an employer will treat it the same as an awesome zbrush sculpt from gears of war. While Lego paid the bills, you need to look out for #1 and be working on assets in your free time that can be used on a portfolio.
I was in the same situation, laid off after 2 years with a company (right next to yours actually), with a portfolio that had good work but not the type of art that all the big games were doing. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking "i'm an industry vet now, I'm hot shit and everyone should respect that just because I've put the hours in". Just like any student, it all boils down to what you can show in your portfolio. It took me 9 months to find a new job, and I got a great new job pretty much on the strength of new personal art I created after I got laid off.
It is hard times for a lot of people right now and not just in our industry. I feel for you man I really do as I have been in similar situations in the past. One thing to consider is getting out the game industry all together. It's getting to the point where everyone should pretty much expect to get laid off once a year or when their project is done. Honesty I don't think things are going to change any time soon either. I am seeing more and more contract jobs and less full time positions for artist. Even if you do land a full time position that doesn't really mean anything when the studio closes.
I truly believe that the day of the $20 million dollar budget for games is all but over, unless you are Activision. Companies are not even coming close to making their investments back. With the new tablet and phones coming out it is becoming more profitable for companies to hire 6-10 man teams to make games in a short amount of time. Not to mention that no one is willing to risk paying $60 on a game that is unknown.
The gears of change are moving in this industry and I am not sure it a sustainable why to make a living anymore.
so you get laid off once a year and everytime you have to rebuild your porfolio/pray you'll land on your feet....
Damn between getting hired, fired, and starting over where do you we find time to make some good art? lol.
the only professional work i have is a bunch of car models. at last GDC I had several guys look at my porfolio and say... dude your humans need work but your cars are pretty good, maybe you should do that?
That sucked to hear especially considering I have been studying CHARACTER art since I was 16.
But its nice to have your ego torn down once in a while, it lets you know that you've really found your passion, cause im still here arent I? and so are you OP.
So fuck em, I know money is tight n all, but If you were doing this for the money I'd feel sorry for you
Most 3d artists are complete bums. Sorry, just keeping it real. They're in 3D because they're too lazy to study and think they'll be able to sit doodling in zbrush and photoshop all day and not have to get a "real job".
I regularly see artists moaning they can't find a job and their portfolio hasn't changed the last 6 months. How would they fit into a work environment where you're expected to produce a whole nextgen asset in 1-5 days?
Kill your current portfolio, build from scratch, we'll come back in a month and check your progress.
/\This, especially you're expected to produce a whole next-gen/current-gen asset in 1-5 days.
Wanted to add you have to not think of the work your doing as art you have to think of It as producing a product, helped me out loads once I wrapped my head around that idea.
Art is personal work, product is professional work.
Replies
You don't write your own reviews, maybe tone it down a notch.
Good luck dude!
This is all personal though, and everyone's story is. I hated art direction too, it's often vague and I just wanted to smack the folks saying, can I get that but make it more 'arty' or can you warm up that beige?.. 1 and 0's in IT don't lie.. it either works or it doesn't and it makes my life tons easier.
Good luck to you, and hope everything works out. It's cool to tell people you work at a game company, but it's not everything it's cracked up to be. (at least it wasn't for me)
This brings up another point I wanted to mention. Looking at portfolios I only ever want to see your max output. I want to see the best you can possibly do. I never want see an asset that is good "because"... "because I did it in 2 days", "because I used XXX technique", "because i limited myself to XXX specs". I only every want to see art that is good, because its the best you can do and its awesome.
So do not short change yourself on your portfolio work, you're not impressing me by giving yourself an unrealistic deadline to complete the work. Sure its a fun exercise, but IMO these type of personal tests aren't portfolio worthy. I have kept myself from saying you should keep X asset or drop X asset up to this point, because if you're working hard you'll eventually replace all the work you have currently, but because of the circumstances above, you will probably want to drop it.
Give yourself a realistic deadline, lets say a current gen, high detailed FPV weapon model, if you can complete this in 5-10 working days, you're working at an industry standard pace. Certainly its a problem if you're taking a month to complete the asset, you should be doing everything in your power to speed up your workflow, but doing in a gun in 2 days just isn't going to be very fruitful for you.
So I want to see your full potential is really what I'm getting at. If I want you on a project that has insane deadlines, corners are going to be cut and that is natural, but you shouldn't ever advertise yourself on that basis. You never want to be known as the guy who works super fast but does sub-par work.
maybe when i get really good the fact im an arsehole wont be an issue either
This is some excellent advice.
Yeh, Good Advice. But when it comes down to working within budgets and limitations, thats when a game Artist shows his true colors.
Ive seen so many Artists that can create great looking artwork, yet fall over themselves when complying with certain limitations.
A good example is from one of my environments pieces for a RTS console title.
500,000 tris for everything. 4km long City scape - no culling or occlusion of meshes - no instancing. Vertex Lit. Limited textures.
Personal work, released game title is so different. Its great to see both in a folio imo.
Sure - but when you need to hire an artist for medium or long term, you'd rather bet on his/her artistic skills and eye instead of going for someone with a tendency to optimize the crap out of everything while doing artistically average work. It's all about finding the folks who know how to spend their time and ressources efficiently.
(the Zbrush kids having no clue about game art and hoping to be the next big thing are another case altogether...)
Yeah, artistic skill, and useful production skills like getting clean bakes etc. Far too few people actually know how to do clean bakes, or cleanly define materials with texturing etc. I don't even really specifically look for people who are very talented artistically, or very creative, but people who know how to execute at a high level.
I'll take an artist that tells me "But this asset isn't going to bake well at XXX tricount" instead of an artist that just follows the tricount and delivers a sub par model with a wonky bake. If you get what i'm saying. Provided the artist knows what he's saying and is actually RIGHT of course. =P
We're at a point in the industry where technical restrictions shouldn't be a huge boundary to getting cool art done and in video games, so I don't think its really valid that I would need to look at portfolio's with this filter of "but he only had XXX" or whatever.
Maybe I'm going off a bit on a tangent here now...
I like this advice the best.
But I'd rather live in a city rich in employment opportunities. Job stability does wonders for my quality of life.
Yeah, my point was more like: if you can do a gun in two days, you have no excuse why you are not making another folio piece, RIGHT NOW. If filling up the portfolio was a huuuge effort, that took months for a single thing to be finished, it would easier to make up excuses for yourself. Now there are no excuses :] Wasnt implyin that one should impose time restrictions etc when making portfolio pieces.
And yet most games have large flaws, in their pipeline, in their art from a technical standpoint, etc. I think we are at a point where games are really pushing the consoles, so we put more and more effort on technical things when creating assets, so I know that when I am looking for an artist, i am always thinking of things like "yeah, but how would you turn this giant prop into modules so you can keep the texeldensity high enough on PS3" Very few artists show that they have any kind of technical skills needed in a real development environment, in their folios. So i definately think that kind of "experiments" have their place in a portfolio, stuff like "i made this entire environment with just 2 512s and 100 tris and still it looks good".
yea, my favourite advice of the whole thread. If you wanna work local, this is the only way!!!!
When I was putting together my graduate portfolio/reel, we were given a loose 2 week deadline for each piece and where alot of my coursemates tended to just take aslong as they wanted, I would always make sure each piece was finished for the deadlines (it was painful in some cases) but it meant that I got,
A) Faster,
C) Better with each piece made.
This being said I know that there are ALOT of things that I would/will do differently and every piece in my portfolio has problems, but doing a piece of work (ie a Vehicle/Collection of Props/Building) within 2 weeks as well as possible will mean that before long you'll have a big, badass portfolio that you can be proud of, and if you have to scrap something, hell its only 2 weeks work.
Making mistakes isnt necessarily a bad thing as long as you can admit you've made mistakes/learn from them. Hell if you can learn from the mistakes in your current portfolio than your next iteration will be much much better.
Good luck dude.
Game Art is not only making high polys, and the one artist that manages to bake an asset in less then XX hours is the king of the hill, and gets all the jobs.
You say you would hire someone with this specific skills to work with you, and I say you're just looking for another "you" to work with.
There SO much more to it, it's almost impossible to type it all down without making it look like a full blown article, but really bakes and shit is just one side of it, a technical side.
Game Art can be divided into a few subareas, technical, artistical and social.
Technical means, can you finish that asset within the given budget, LOD's, collision, good reusage of UV shells, texture res, poly count and within the given time?
Whereas obviously this is a very crucial and important skill, everyone can learn how to bake a cylinder without waving and all this technical mumbo jumbo, it's just following a set of rules and guidelines, and practice)
The Artistic one, not everyone has it. It can be achieved with a lot of work, some people are just born with the artistic touch on them, others dont, and you can be the most technical person in your team, but if you don't know how to make beautiful assets and keep your art director happy, you're just as fucked.
Finnaly, social, can you do well on a team? (No matter if you're working with outsourcing or on-site working with a team)
Are you a egocentric and pretentious person? Cos if you are, you'll have problems working on a team, and, you're just as fucked.
Having a look at the OP's portfolio, he still doesn't qualify for neither of the mentioned points. Still lacks on the technical field, I don't see anything that inspires talent, and judging by his own words, he still needs to learn how to become a humble artist, otherwise he will never grow professionally to the point where employers will even consider him.
"An artist is nothing without the gift, the gift is nothing without the work"
I'm looking for similar skills in him to that which I posses, yes, because he seems to be taking a similar career path. Certainly I am using my own experiences as a basis for forming my opinions, as everyone else in the world does too. If I felt my experiences were irrelevant to the situation, I wouldn't be here posting.
While everyone can be taught how to do a clean bake, it can be very painful needing to do this during production, as an industry, we should be beyond the point where every artist needs to be taught how to do a normal map bake. I mean honestly, there are so many resources out there if you just look. So yeah, anyone who has useful job skills like clean modeling, clean bakes, etc is going to be a more attractive hire.
Raw artistic talent is generally very important when looking for a concept artist. But when you're looking for someone who is going to create X asset from X concept(the vast majority of game assets...) its good to look for a guy who can simply produce. Not everyone is or needs to be that rockstar that concepts and designs all his assets and then models them as well, as this is very rarely needed in a production environment. Certainly some studios will require this sort of thing more than others, and as an artist you're more attractive the more you can do, but of course, only if you can do all of those things well. If you can do everything, but you're not good at anything, its going to be difficult, the industry is very specialized right now, so finding your niche' is definitely a good thing.
Now if you're just talking basic art skills, certainly this should be a requirement for any game artist. Luckily lacking basic art skills are generally very obvious when looking at someone's work, so it would be quite unusual to find someone who can produce very clean work, but lacks any sort of artistic understanding. Without understanding form, line, negative space, readability, color theory, etc, there is no way you're going to create assets that exhibit clean modeling and texturing.
TL;DR; I'm not sure where you get this idea that I've said the only thing that matters is highpoly and bakes or whatever. All I've done is talk about some specific skills that I think help an artist to get hired, I didn't write a list of ALL of the skills you need.
What i'm saying here is NOT technical skill > artistic skill, but instead that someone who is competent both artistically and technically and can pull it all together and make a finished product, is going to make a more attractive hire over someone who just has a lot of raw talent, but hasn't really translated that into real assets before.
This applies to character artists, concept artists(concept artists need to understand perspective, 3d, how things will animate, far too few really do!), environment artists, etc etc.
while working remember this, you cant just say "its good enough" and move on, it has to be the very best you could have done, and every next time you model that bar should be higher.
I was in the same situation, laid off after 2 years with a company (right next to yours actually), with a portfolio that had good work but not the type of art that all the big games were doing. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking "i'm an industry vet now, I'm hot shit and everyone should respect that just because I've put the hours in". Just like any student, it all boils down to what you can show in your portfolio. It took me 9 months to find a new job, and I got a great new job pretty much on the strength of new personal art I created after I got laid off.
lol
I truly believe that the day of the $20 million dollar budget for games is all but over, unless you are Activision. Companies are not even coming close to making their investments back. With the new tablet and phones coming out it is becoming more profitable for companies to hire 6-10 man teams to make games in a short amount of time. Not to mention that no one is willing to risk paying $60 on a game that is unknown.
The gears of change are moving in this industry and I am not sure it a sustainable why to make a living anymore.
Best of luck man, maybe trying teaching lol
Damn between getting hired, fired, and starting over where do you we find time to make some good art? lol.
the only professional work i have is a bunch of car models. at last GDC I had several guys look at my porfolio and say... dude your humans need work but your cars are pretty good, maybe you should do that?
That sucked to hear especially considering I have been studying CHARACTER art since I was 16.
But its nice to have your ego torn down once in a while, it lets you know that you've really found your passion, cause im still here arent I? and so are you OP.
So fuck em, I know money is tight n all, but If you were doing this for the money I'd feel sorry for you
/\This, especially you're expected to produce a whole next-gen/current-gen asset in 1-5 days.
Wanted to add you have to not think of the work your doing as art you have to think of It as producing a product, helped me out loads once I wrapped my head around that idea.
Art is personal work, product is professional work.