Question about roles in a game company...

DaveSilver

Hey everyone, so I was watching some game trailers and in the trailer there were various statues in the settings that were being shown off and basically I was wondering who usually makes statues like this? Are statue props usually made by an environment artist or a character artist or someone in-between?

The reason I ask is simply because I have never thought to do a piece like a statue before but I figure if its something I might be expected to do within the industry I should probably try and put one together at some point. On top of that I know a lot of you guys and gals are currently at studios working so I figured you might know the answer.

Anyway, thanks for any help you can provide and have a great day.

eld

I think a versatile environment artist might be able to do statues, as in a company there's always one or more of the environment artists with some character art skills.
There's more character art requirements and stuff in actual character art, compared to making one static statue.

It depends entirely on the structure of the company though.

Bigjohn

That stuff really depends on a ton of things.

If the statue is big and prominent, and it shows a lot of anatomy, there's a good chance a character artist will do it. But that really depends on time constraints. If there isn't time available to put a character guy on it, it'll go to an environment artist. Maybe the character guy will do the zbrush for it, and pass it on to the environment guy. Maybe the environment guy will do it, and get crits from the character guy.

If there's really no time, or if the statue isn't a big prominent piece, or if it doesn't show much anatomy, it will most likely be done by an environment guy.

It's really random. And really varies from studio to studio, and depends on time constraints, budgets, and who knows what else...

d1ver

from what I've seen statues actually tend to get outsourced a lot.)

Autocon

d1ver wrote: »

from what I've seen statues actually tend to get outsourced a lot.)

^^ This

I would say most if not possibly all of our uniquely mapped statues was outsourced. Character artists need to focus on characters as they are more important then silly little statues, Environment Artists need to focus on creating a large scene and keep things in frame rate and 3D Artists need to focus on more important things like weapons and things that get destroyed.


Or at least here at ND thats how things work. Statues are actually of very little importance in most cases as they are more for decoration then anything else. They also take up a lot of time.



I have had to work with statues in the past but that is limited to place them around a scene and breaking/destroying said statues that were created by outsourcing.

Justin Meisse

I've done a good amount of statues as an environment artist, it's a character that doesn't have to be animated so that saves a lot of trouble.

Mongrelman

Aye, varies. I've been on projects where us character artists pretty much did all our stuff then moved onto doing props like statues and even things that are typically done by environment artists anyway.

Snacuum

Disney did a lot of this, the small grey statues are called Maquettes, and if they were used for characters the point was to create a single reference for the character that was tangible in it's scale and 3d qualities.

Of course it was more prominent when the movies were mostly 2d and you got a specialist sculptor to do it.

skankerzero

psst... he's talking about statues in the game...

haikai

If there are already some decent, generic character models available then sometimes you can just take it, pose it, and then give it a stone/metal texture so it can almost be done by anyone.

DaveSilver

Wow, I had forgotten I started this topic until a couple minutes ago and coming back to it the response has been better than expected. Thanks so much for the help everyone and I think I pretty much have the answers I was looking for.