3d artists - out of a job in the future?
So for a while now I've been worried that 3d artists will all be put of a job because of advancing technology, for example with Zbrush's Zmesher it's possible to retop with a click of a button, while still in its infancy it has the potential to completely remove a stage of 3d modeling, couple that with software that scans 2d images, photos or real world 3d items and turns them into a digital model, which can then be auto re-topped well damn, there's not much left for a person specialized in 3d modeling/sculpting to do.
So is the death of 3d artists coming?
So is the death of 3d artists coming?
Replies
*odor beat me to it
Only if you don't exercise, manage your diet, and abstain from sexual release.
Haha..nice.
this happens everytime we make our jobs easier. The entire world is advancing, so things are bound to change and how we work. Its not like someone is going to figure out how to make a game with one person and a bunch of software over night. and even if they did.. it would probably be very bland and cookie cutter.
and if thats the case... that games can be made that easily.. great news for indies and individuals to focus on making a good game and not getting bogged down by content creation.
and just in case.. keep some toasters around to beat up for practice when the robots take over. know their weaknesses
wait, is that actually a good example ?
even though i dont think painting is killed, lot of it is mainly in fine art but most of it has been replaced by large format digital prints, digital displays etc.
unless you are talking about painting houses, billboards etc.
anyways, in future i would like to just sculpt and paint without thinkig about topology or texture sizes...
I had a producer who thought this would work...he didnt consider the mounds of garbage you have to wade through to get a decent model...or the headache of trying consolidate an art style piecemeal through a matket place..it's easier to interface with a professional artist with an exact spec, that you can give revisions and feedback to...
There are plenty of painters that still use paint...
My point was tools won't replace artists
and to Bibendum argument, Its still "hard" to make things look good, sure, a lot of hobbyist have photoshop but its not like the make big movie posters or commercials, they still hire real professionals for that, because its quicker and will look better in the end.
and as a company you rather hire someone to do something quick then have some art director do it instead of doing his real job =
Something that is starting to blur out more and more though is the line between 3d artist and concept artist, they are more and more becoming the same person.
The new tools may make it easier to achieve realism. So if we're talking about what now a person would aspire to replicate from real-life 1:1, then yeah, that sort of super technical reproduction may become obsolete. And good on that. But if you ever want to show any kind of artistic taste, if you want to represent something that doesn't simply exist in real life, then you're going to need much more than computers that can replicate reality.
The camera may have done lots of damage to classical painters. But it made it possible for people like George Lucas to need people like Jim Henson.
So thats 2.3 million to the power of 16.7 mill. That's a hell of a big number of combinations when you get down to it.
Many modern games suffer from samey/bad art direction and they all start looking like clones of each other. I'd like to see someone perfect 'hand drawn' look. I have yet to see it. Wind waker and others that used cell shading still are far from good hand drawn style animation.
Take Transformers: Fall of cybertron. It used unreal engine and the games' art direction is limited by the rendering tech you have.
While the game looked ok there were some seriously cheezy looking models. The neon cars running around the energon transport come to mind. Not to mention lots of ugly textures because of console limitations.
Right now games suffer from sever content limitations because game assets have become too big and complex to make for mere humans unaided by advanced tech.
I'd love to see tools dedicated to smaller problems like classic pixel art. I'd love for small teams to make tonnes of 2D SNES style graphic games if the tools allowed them to make buckets of awesome pixel art for cheap.
Then producers started telling us that Turbo Squid was the future, and that one day MMO's would be made by 5 designers, and a bunch of bought models.
In 2005, we were told procedural textures are going to one day remove the need for texture artists.
At this time, Characters went from taking 3 days, to a week, to a month to make. PS1 to PS2 to 360/PS3
Now we have 60k Triangle uber complex characters, with a plethora of material, and 14+ masks to edit, SSS textures, shaders to tweak, with blended normal maps, displacements. All signs pointing towards 2+ months per character.
I keep hearing promises of these 1-button solutions to make everything faster, easier, and better, but then shit keeps requiring more and more time to hit higher bars.
But remove 3D artists in general? Never.
The whole point of being an artist is you can create anything that is both real and imaginary. This applies to all artists by the way.
For example, there are programs that can make cartoons very easily. However, the end result can be very generic or cheap looking.
Now compare that to a classic Disney movie where every scene is hand drawn by multiple artists. You can't do that with a click of a mouse. It takes years of experience and patience to animate characters with such expression and emotion that a computer can't generate on its own.
The same idea applies to 3D Modeling. If you want something never done before or not generic looking, you're going to need an artist.
amen
yup Ive been working in mobile games for 3 years and we went from not even having much 3D on any mobile device to now having up to 10000 triangles in a single character and our games went from taking 2 months to make to taking around about 6months to a year!
That's ridiculous, Warchief Thrall would never allow his people to be kept in a zoo :poly118:
Just wait... they already got the pandas. they'll get the orcs too
It's coming, just they got the timeframe wrong. Most likely it will be a century for full one button AAA style graphics. But advancements have been made for smaller assets. Consider SpeedTree for instance. I'm sure they will perfect tools that deal with objects that are static and static environments as well. Anything that doesn't animate lends itself to computer-aided creativity which will cut production times.
The reality is it's just a really hard problem and it's going to take DECADES at the very least. Games got too big too fast so you went from small teams to teams of over 400 because of asset bloat.
can a machine, or a mathematical equation look at something with an artistic eye and decide whether it looks good or not? no, they can't.
so while dDo can spit out some pretty decent textures in 1/10 the time a human can, you can't just leave it be and call it done, because anyone with an artistic talent can still find a way to improve it and make it look less formulaic. much like zremesher can currently provide a fantastic topological base, any tech artist/animator will tell you that it will still need a good going over before it can actually be used.
all they do is speed up or remove the time consuming TECHNICAL aspects of our job, and allow us to focus on what really matters... make cool shit.
if you are fearing evolution, bury your head in the sand, if not rise above and meet your potential.
I don't think these tools will remove the artists, I think it will help a lot with time and budget, I don't have a crystal ball and none of us do but it could lead to possibly more stable jobs and well... more jobs? Who knows time will tell.
oh
...ok =P sorry, missunderstood u then, I though u meant like "normal" ppl would start doing their own models. nvm then
Get yo' fucking swimming trunks ready,
Cuz we're going 4D.
Also, I wouldn't freak out about zremesher. It's got years before its bad ass. It's not the end all of tools.
There is allways a way to delevop crazier and complex shit to
tell our storys or to let dreams come true.
I hope that one day we could develop AAA holodeck games
hmm this is interesting, why do you say that its the focused specialization of staff that results in a better quality game? surely people could feasibly achieve the same results even if they for example model and texture assets rather than just model constantly? I know people get better at a role after a while but maybe the game could suffer because of the fact that peoples other talents are not being taken advantage of.
I would think that creating an asset from high poly to low, texturing and shading included allows you to focus more on your work instead of going from an asset to another without caring that much since it's not "yours". At least that's how I feel.
At least one of the games you mention was created using the non specialist way.
Going for the specialist path might sound like a great idea logically, because that one person should become a god at that one thing, reality usually looks more like burned out people wanting to do more then one thing.
I changed to a smaller company because I wanted to try different things,
and not bury myself down with one game for many years doing one thing, worked on 4 games this year as part of a team and creating levels from scratch myself, and I have never felt better and never felt more passionate about my work,
interesting and very common take on approach. I know how you feel and somewhat agree, but weather we want ownership or not won't matter. Pretty soon we are going to have to let go of that for the greater good of the project. Pretty soon it will just be Art Assemblers. Just about EVERYTHING will be outsourced. Otherwise, the only alternative is to keep current gen engines, same cost, everything looks like Titanfall. Well, on The Xbone that is.