Massive outsourcing on Uncharted 3, industry standard?
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Excuse the ignorance if this is common knowledge but I know nothing about how the games industry works.
I've just watched the credits roll on Uncharted 3 and I noticed the artist credits. I watched for the art section, and was surprised to see only about 7 environment artists and 2 character artists. I was thinking 'surely they've missed a few people, that would've taken them a millennium to create all that art with under 10 or so people'.
Then I saw the 'additional art' section with loads (and I mean LOADS, there must've been a hundred or more) of Chinese names and what appeared to be Spanish names from about 5 different outsourcing studios.
Is this pretty normal practice on games of this scope? If so, what do the in-house guys actually do? Just clean things up?
I've just watched the credits roll on Uncharted 3 and I noticed the artist credits. I watched for the art section, and was surprised to see only about 7 environment artists and 2 character artists. I was thinking 'surely they've missed a few people, that would've taken them a millennium to create all that art with under 10 or so people'.
Then I saw the 'additional art' section with loads (and I mean LOADS, there must've been a hundred or more) of Chinese names and what appeared to be Spanish names from about 5 different outsourcing studios.
Is this pretty normal practice on games of this scope? If so, what do the in-house guys actually do? Just clean things up?
Replies
Environments do get outsourced though, and even when they are done well will usually require a ton of cleanup.
Main characters would be done in house and go through a lot of planning and iteration, but background characters and npcs could be shipped out to outsource as well.
I think that the bigger use of outsourcing is it part replacing the massive hiring at the end of a project, and then the massive layoffs after it is done to create those 6 months worth of extra assets. So instead of hiring 200 temps, they might outsource most of that work so they don't have to hire to that unsustainable level and then lay everyone off afterwards.
This is just my experience, how outsourcing is used will differ from studio to studio. In house guys don't just do cleanup, though that is a part of it, but they usually work on the more important assets that have a direct impact on the game.
BEAUTIFUL game though
Usually in-house artists are doing pre-production concept work, help establish art spec, workflow / pipeline, and once all of that is laid out and art moves into production, they handle the main set pieces, main hero characters and models (Nathan Drake isn't going to get outsourced), and frequently function as meta-leads wrangling the often screwed-up or sub-par outsource work.
It's hard enough practicing a collaborative artform on a team project across different locales, especially when you're using technology, workflows, methodology and vernacular that might basically be unique to that group. Add culture gaps and language barriers to it and some of the stuff you can get in outsource drops is good for a bad joke at best.
I worked as an in-house CSG on one of the three hero aircraft exteriors for the FlightSim X addon pack, and it had originally been farmed out to Siberia. It was a mess and my FTE lead called them up and went "WTF is this?" The environment lead on that project also fired an entire outsource studio (on the west side of the Pacific) because they were chewing through time and money and accomplishing nothing except pissing him off.
Turn 10 had better luck with outsource vendors (mostly because they've had four games to build those contacts), but even after a huge chunk of money and months on end to get each car model or track to the studio, they still do a metric long-shit-ton of cleanup and in-house tuning and tweaking. I watched the car team spend 6 months (sometimes longer) cleaning up outsourced models, and I personally did cleanup on partially outsourced tracks. It went better than FSX:Xpack, but it was still a production-continuity mind-rape.
For me at least, in basically every case I've observed, outsourcing really just doesn't pan out with the savings-to-quality ratio management is convinced it'll have. There's this delusion that the company heads can call up some shmoe on the "far away" side of the world and pay them an insultingly low amount of money because they practically live in squalor, give them an impossible deadline, and they'll have a masterpiece handed to them. Oh, and the folks who made it will have tears of gratitude in their eyes for the pittance they were paid (if they get anything at all once the sweatshop foreman takes his cut).
There are some absolutely fantastic freelancers out there (Ben Matthias, Liquid Development, Valkyrie, 3Point all spring to mind) who are REAL outsource artists or outsource studios, and they can make a blockbuster production possible by expanding the feasible scope of a project beyond what could be handled by a team small enough to be managed on-site. But I don't think they're what most managers or producers have in mind usually when the word "outsource" gets mentioned... which is a travesty.
When I've seen outsourced stuff in the past over here It's always been per asset pricing, including the time to create and texture the asset.
My experience with outsourcing is the majority of the stuff will be decent with a few awesome pieces and a few stinkers.
As far as cleaning up stuff I typically just get them as bugs and fix them when I have time. If it's really horrible, I've seen outsource managers send it back.
So you're 100% right, it really does differ from studio to studio. I think in the end, it works out best for everyone because a bunch of people don't get laid off after a project is complete.
check out the fear stuff if you're bored: http://www.exisinteractive.com/art-of-f-e-a-r-3/
oh, and we usually just get credited as "Exis", listing everyone's name would be tedious.
Outsourcing helps avoid avoids massive layoffs, but thats also because those people don't get hired in the first place, so its a mixed bag. However, it seems to be more of a necessity these days with the scope of AAA games.
Yeah I think the credit is well deserved by ND. I mean, sure the outsourced stuff is great but it needs to be based on strong concepts, and a great technical team to carry it through. And the design/writing/sound is all first-rate and appears to be all in-house.
Having said that, I did kinda feel a similar way to DPaynter, it's a shame that a game so widely acclaimed for its stunning art often is credited directly to the main developer and an article will commonly say 'Naughty Dogs artists did a fantastic job with the art' when a more fair comment might be something more like 'Naughty Dog and their various outsourced teams did a great job'. Doesn't sound as good though I suppose.
One thing that doesn't seem to have been touched on in the replies here is the cost, I'm assuming (trying as hard as I can not to stereotype) that a huge factor in large-scale Chinese outsourcing is that they are paid a huge amount less than in house artists? I mean, I know it avoids the short term employment and post-project layoffs by outsourcing, but presumably there's a massive cost saving in wages too?
Also on a high scale title like uncharted it becomes less of an issue of cost cutting and more to do with time constraints. 2 years is not a whole lot of time.
I personally was new to the industry a few years back and didn't ask many questions, I was happy to have a job and enjoyed it. But the artist job I got ended up involving making boxes and applying reference for outsource. That was simply how that studio worked and personally it wasn't a very good fit for me so I moved on.
In stark contrast to that I haven't experienced outsourcing anything for the last two years. Production will always go up and down and outsourcing will come in and out again. But how a studio outsources there content and the effect it has on the artists job in relation to that is very important.
I personally wouldn't want to work for any studio that turned an artists job into micro managing and fixing others work as your only purpose. The best way to outsource is to separate artists who want to be creative and those that enjoy fixing and managing. Studios should always recruit 'outsource artists/managers' as a separate department, but this is by far the case.
I hope it helps anyone who might be joining the industry, just never be afraid to ask questions in any interview and really understand the working practice of the place your applying for before taking the job.
at studios like Visceral, where team sizes were 12-20 and the work was outsourced.
It depends on how the pipeline is designed and implemented.
One thing I've heards (and wouldnt surprise me if ND did this) was to do all ZBrush/High Poly in-house, while getting them to do all the low poly, unwrapping, baking, and first texturing pass.
Most of that is pretty automated already.
From the amount of high profile studios we deal with, I'd say outsourcing is fairly common. We got like 8 of the 10 top US publishers and their studios as clients, and we're now expanding to 3D for feature film and TV, having worked on Transformers, Rango and some other movies. We're close to having 1000 artists here, still growing.
Personally I have to say I'm proud to work with these guys. The Chinese studio I worked before had the common issues people gripe about when dealing with outsourcers, but those guys here are real pros. We do modeling, sculpting (like EA sports titles), texturing, animation for chars and enviros. I guess that's why companies trust us handling their AAA content
As far as I know, we usually give you a quote depending on the hours and skills required. Usually we deal with a larger batches of assets rather than "we need a single character" requests.
About wages.... I think here in Shanghai, where most outsourcers (and in-sourcers are) are, the wages for office jobs and skilled labour are getting close to eastern Europe (non EU), like Ukraine, Russia, etc. Maybe they're even higher. Plus the infrastructure, direct flights from/to anywhere in the world, the economical situation is stable and there are many skilled artists available.
So we had 26 credited Environment Artists here at ND for Uncharted 3 if you take Environment Artist in the typical sense and dont even included Lighting Artists which would bring it up to 30
As for the huge long list of outsourcing that is not uncommon at all. In fact that is about how much most studios use in terms of outsourcing. The difference is that ND/Sony have always been really good at crediting absolutely every single individual if they had a helping hand in making Uncharted no matter how big or small or even if the work was never used. Most of the times you will just see a studio name so your credits dont run the ridiculous 30 minuets like our did haha.
No single environment was outsourced, that was all created, and assembled in house. Things we typically outsource are unique mapped props that would require HP/Zbrush sculpts and take a few days to make. There is no point to have an Environment Artist waste time on something as trivial as a little statue or some small prop when they have a large environment to tackle. And the few 3d Artists we have on staff while they do make some of these unique assets they are also creating everything that gets destroyed.
We outsource flavor items that help populate our worlds even more, we outsource HP sculpts, collision, models to be second UV unwrapped for lightmaps, we outsource QA, for things we call Shadow Proxies which are used to cast shadows as our normal meshes dont since its too expensive. We outsource things that are too tidius or too time consuming.
All these things are needed for a huge triple A game and with games becoming more and more complex you need more and more hands on the project and we feel every person who helped contribute in someway deserves to have there named displayed
Edit: We have only 1 lead here at ND who deals with Outsourcing. He usually sends things back for first and second passes before the regular environment artists get the assets to put in there scenes as he knows what will and wont work. We dont spend much time fixing outsourcing assets as we have built up a great relationship with our outsourcing studios and now they know what we need and how we need it.