Change of Skill Set
polycounter lvl 9
I strongly considering to become an environment artist rather than just doing characters. I've been told by many of my peers I should and that it would make me more versatile as an artist, perhaps even keep me employed longer.
Where do I start?
www.terrell3d.weebly.com : if you're interested in seeing my character work so far.
Where do I start?
www.terrell3d.weebly.com : if you're interested in seeing my character work so far.
Replies
I don't mean to discourage you from trying out environment art, if you find you like it great, go for it but if it's just to broaden your appeal it's probably not going to work.
After looking over your portfolio, I think you are in the "Alien Artist" stage and you need more humanoid characters. You have 3 aliens which shows one narrow slice of what a character artist might be called upon to do. There are a lot of people that crank out aliens only and for the most part they get a pretty bad reputation because "Stop critiquing my work, those aren't anatomy errors, it's alien physiology!" said the guy who demonstrated a flaming desire to be a giant pain in the ass of any art director that was dumb enough to hire him/her, heh.
Anyway, I think its important to demonstrate basic human proportions, most of the time you'll be constrained to those proportions and your creative freedom is let loose on the clothing. Yep you're probably going to be a fashion guru, which your current pieces barely speak to.
Your wireframe shots show that your models have a lot of polys. It's important to demonstrate low poly modeling, unwrapping and texturing techniques. These will knock you out of the running as well. If they have to train you to do this or hire another person to do it they're going to go with someone who already has those skills.
With that said, I think you've got a pretty awesome skill set already and you're well on your way to landing a kick ass job but this stuff is holding you back from the job it seems like you really want. But like I said if you try env art and you like it, awesome! You'll find there are a few more openings that pop up. But be careful, I don't think environment art is more stable, I think it's less stable. Places tend to hire env artists, en-bulk to quickly crank out a lot of content and then lay them off as soon as the project ships. Some stick around but almost everyone polishes up their resume when things go gold.