Work in next gen?
interpolator
I've always wondered, how do people get first in line to working with the next gen of consoles? I imagine with Wii U or the next Xbox launching soon, developers would be looking to hire now but how do you go about finding those job postings if at all?
Also, do employers take you in if you have no experience in the industry? Is a strong portfolio good enough? And do they teach you what to do or must you learn next gen all by yourself?
Also, do employers take you in if you have no experience in the industry? Is a strong portfolio good enough? And do they teach you what to do or must you learn next gen all by yourself?
Replies
I knew this one guy that got a job taking textures, hitting the button in zBrush to convert the texture into a B&W alpha, then inflating the mesh with that alpha, and baking out a normal map. This was for a AAA game.
But for this next generation, I doubt there will be a gamechanger as big as zBrush was back then. So pretty much everything that we do now, but on crack.
Usually there's some indirect learning going on. Some guy may mentor you for a while and answer questions - this is usually your lead. Some companies have small 1 week bootcamps. Often they're also give you some time to get oriented and get you started with easy non critical tasks.
A good studio has their workflows - project specific, company specific and/or engine specific - documented on e.g. a wiki, so you're expected to dig through all the info and learn the required workflows on your own, and ask your lead if you really get lost. Make friends with the artists sitting next to you - they'll also often help and answer questions (remember, it's team work
As long as you don't expect to get stuff spoon fed this is the way it usually works.
www.readyatdawn.com
</shill>
There are definitely new techniques and software being used, but most of that is still proprietary and/or specific to the developer at this point - without the hardware even being announced yet, the developers that are working on next-gen are testing out and proving new pipelines and workflows - there isn't an easy, compartmentalized workflow like there is for working on a 3PS UDK asset, for example - new technology ideally means new boundaries and workflows, and those won't harden up for a couple of years. You can see the same thing with the last generation as well.
At the moment, with next-gen being cutting edge, the number of developers that are trusted to work with release/near release development is relatively small, and pretty much need to have a good track record and pedigree, which typically means they're large and heavily staffed up. After the hardware is announced and MS/Sony have released their specs and started to build hype, then you'll see the second wave of development studios looking to get on that gravy train and will see a lot of staffing accordingly.
VFX, complex materials (ie, pushing beyond diffuse/normal/spec and more towards complicated, specialized shaders), and lighting have the most to gain from new technology - modeling and concept are not going to see rapidly different workflows as their pipelines are fairly technology agnostic at this point. Rather instead look at the tech demos for UE4/Square's engine and note that the new features are primarily special effects, lighting, and a handful of specific technology solutions like hair.
I think the most important asset an artist can have is to be a really fantastic artist - the specifics of a tool can be learned on the job (and frequently are - we have a lot of Max artists here who spend a week or two ramping up on Maya, for example) but you really can't teach someone how to be a better artist on the job in a reasonable timeframe.
People hire folks without industry experience all the time, but they don't hire scrubs.
Also, is there a place for drawing up scenes with lighting? For example, say a game takes place in a city at night, would I be able to draw up sketches showing how each type of lighting, effects a city (for example, a depiction of a torch that gives off an orange ambiance on any person who walks by)?
Yep. Tools and techniques are easy to teach. Artistic talent, integrity, team work and other soft skills are not easy to teach.
In my company we hire lots of juniors (cheaper but also seniors are somewhat rare to hire here) and we put a lot of effort into training them, as long as they bring talent and motivation to the table. It's totally possible to train someone up from junior to senior (who then works on stuff like EA sports or Uncharted) if both the company and the artist put an effort into it and the artist has some talent.
I think a good company makes an effort to give artists training resources, keeps their own projects well documented to allow new people to easily catch up, and encourages sharing of techniques.
no.
Lighting artists don't draw sketches of how lights will look. Lighting artists place lights in the 3d environment to light the scene. You would do it in engine or in your 3d package.
It is rather analogous to film lighting.
As lighting tools are very specific to the engine, your best bet for developing lighting skills would be to work in both a 3d package and in some popular engines to get a handle on what the ceiling is in terms of potential (3d package, offline rendering) and what the potential floor is (UDK).
I'm not much of a lighter myself, but it's an incredibly difficult skill to do well, and the gulf between a hire-able, working lighter and an amateur is incredibly vast - it's a highly specialized skill that requires very strong foundational art skills, rather than just rote tools use.
CGTalk has a lighting challenge that should give you some idea as to what people do with lighting:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/forumdisplay.php?f=185
e: bugo, as generations refer to consoles as that hardware is what ultimately sets the bar for the majority of game development, pointing to high-end PC efforts is probably closer. While you can run Geomeric's radiosity solution on a 360 it's really not the same. As long as people are making games they'll find newer and better ways to do things, but hardware generations tend to represent large leaps forward in technology and tools.
As for strong art skills, I'm definitely looking into that. I've had skills from before I never knew about and some I'm learning now (ex: Fresnel reflections, rayleigh scattering etc).
haha. tasks that make you think that are the hardest ones
seriously, really good lighters are rare (not just in the CG field). Just switching a light on is easy. But creating a mood with it, playing with color schemes, shadow and light and then staying within the technical limits of an engine can be challenging. You should also have a good understanding of color theory, even real life lighting and a good reference library of art and movies where to get ideas for certain moods and light arrangements.
It should also help to pick up some books that deal with lighting for film and photography which cover the artistic aspects.
(These are honestly just guesses.)
That last couple months of optimizing and polishing to actually get the game to run might be reduced....slightly....kinda. But not really. Will actually probably be worse.
Why?
Everyone will go apeshit not knowing what we can or can't even get away with during development, for at least the first couple years. 2048 textures? Check. 100k triangle characters? Sure, why not, this is TEH FUTURE. Then we'll go overboard, come around to time to actually get it to run and have to cutback, cutback, cutback....just like we do now.
The majority of launch titles for the first year or so will be either mega-blockbusters / safe-bets, or shovelware that everyone will say "Looks just like the old stuff". Too much risk to burn with our economy and not knowing how expensive the XBox 720 or PS4 is gonna even cost, and how many people are going to be ready to drop XYZ price for the first year or so to be certain to build on the new platform to begin with.
Studios are STILL refining their pipelines right NOW to improve their engines, improve their tools, improve their performance - for a console that's essentially been around for 7 years, and games likely in develop for closer to 10.
I don't think we'll be seeing holographic 4096 ULTRA textures on every fire hydrant in games anytime soon. The cold reality is that games aren't sub-par because we are idiots. The art doesn't look poor because we don't know what we are doing. It's a matter of time / money / resources. There's only 1 Blizzard, only 1 Epic, and only a very small number of studios that gets the time, money, and resources to make those amazingly epic games.
Some schlub still has to be able to make that super-ultra-epic high res model, and texture it amazingly well, and build materials to support said ultra ubar high rez, and put it into a level that looks equally phenomenal...which is lit well....and built by some other god-amongst-men....and they have to have the time/budget/capabilities to do so.
A higher end platform doesn't suddenly turn us all into Kevin Johnstone, and a better console doesn't suddenly make our studios on par with Epic or Blizzard. Gears of War 1 still looks better than a vast majority of console games out there today in my opinion. It will be quite some time before the entirety of the industry is really able to fully embrace the capabilities the new consoles will have to offer.
lies
yeap, they starting to believing it ... , is it good or bad?
actually NO
i quite often do paintovers of the scenes that i and others work on...sometimes its alot easier and faster to get a target image out of Photoshop than it is out of a game engine when your balancing exposure/realtime lighting/baked lighting/textures/shader values/tonemapping, once you have a target it can be easier.
like everything else you can learn the technicalities of a particular engine on the job... much more important is knowledge of colour usage and composition
if you are interested in lighting positions (ntop of learning modeling, texturing etc) i would get painting,learn a few engines, light alot of grey box scenes (for colour and comp practice) and get reading alot of papers about upcoming rendering practices... there are alot out there some are very technical, but some are a bit more artist freindly and can be very interesting.....future/current tech topics to look at would be tonemapping, eye/camera adaption, voxel oct tree GI, ray cast GI, physically based lighting models, bdrf, physically modeled skys/atmosphere scattering
also get photographing in HDR...it an really help your knowledge of lighting ranges (beyond the compostion and colour ref it gives you and makes you interact with)
Target comps arent't jthe production role, though. There is a ton of ancillary stuff you can do in a role but outside of concept artist and art director the focus of your role is getting stuff in-game, and the tests you're doing in photoshop are just a means to an end.
I agree with everything you said Ott expect this one point, if in fact you mean the majority of launch titles will be pre existing mega-blockbuster ip titles. I will disagree with that.
There will of course be some mega popular franchise that do make the console jump such as things like COD and Halo but based on the previous generations of consoles new hardware spawns the birth of many many new IP's.
Just to name a few from this gen... Uncharted, inFamous, Resistance, Forza, Gears, Assassins Creed, Mass Effect and so on. While when the PS2 era was born it brought new IP's such as Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, Splinter Cell, Sly Cooper.
All the new franchise from already well established developers while they more or less abandoned there old, already popular series.
There are 2 main reasons I believe the switch to new IP's are done. One is that the developers tiered of working on the same franchise for an entire console generation. Working on the same series over and over again gets old to a lot of people. They want to try new things, grow as developers instead of just refining and perfecting what they already have done. Second is that with a new generation you have a lot of time on your hands. There is quite a lot of tech dependencys and road blocks you will face. This frees up some developers times to try out new stories, new and crazy design ideas they wouldn't have time to before. As artists are waiting on new tech they can look dev new and exciting worlds.
Just my thoughts
sounds interesting. In my company we don't have dedicated lighting artists. The job sort of falls between environment artists and tech-artists. Care to elaborate a bit more about what your job is, what you do and which tech you touch (and which you don't)?