Thread by @delaneykingrox

#gamedev advice of the day. You can usually hire around three junior artists for the price of a senior artist. However, this is a false economy.

You need senior artists early on, which you then expand with mid weight and then junior artists later.

Three junior artists can make a lot of assets. However they do not yet have the experience to know how to make assets efficiently, how to set up art pipelines and how to make assets that work well in engine.

They may produce lots of stuff, but that stuff may be unusable.

Senior artists have the ability to set up art pipelines and make asset creation resources.

Think of this as like building a production like with factory equipment vs. hand making everything.

The other thing experience gives game artists is the ability to see and avoid pitfalls.

For example, a junior artist wanted to sculpt and bake all the terrain in a 100 meter square woodland in zbrush.
No, not in parts... as one entire mesh. All the diffuse, ao, normals...

...divided up into squares of about 4 meters. With 4k maps.

For a VR game.

Yep.

It didn't go well. A senior artist would know how to use tiling textures, vertex paint blending and how to blend baked meshes into tiling ones.

So, my advice is start with the most senior, most technically proficient artist early on. They can set up the art pipeline, organise the art folder structures and naming conventions, and plan out the technical challenges.

Then you can get more bums on seats.

Junior artists are an investment in the future. They can suck up time in training as much as they produce work, but they advance on to mid-weight artists.

Mid-weight artists are your trusty artists who know the deal, get stuff done and you can rely on with minimal handling.

Technical artists make problems go away, help speed up the mid weight artists output (and make them happier) and bring cool effects to your game.

Senior artists have "seen some shit". They are your generals, your military advisers. Professional cat herders and pixel witches.

Art directors make sure all the artists are making the same game, rather than what they think the game is. They generally work to ensure the artists know what they are doing, what it should look like, and help unify and strengthen the project.

Art directors can be "flappy two hand wavey creatives" but they have to be able to pin down and lock down loose concepts into concrete, actionable tasks.

They don't need to be a grizzled senior artist, or even senior- but it helps avoid technical pit traps and problems.

The art director doesn't have to be the boss of the art department. Again, they steer the ship to ensure consistency and a strong direction.

In films, art directors tend to run the day to day admin for the department and the production designer handles the creative side.

So a film art director would say "okay the script has five types of laser guns." They ensure these are designed, approved and communicated to the props dept. The production designer comes up with what the guns will look like, in the context of the mise en scene.

In games however, those roles get smooshed together. Worse, great artists get pushed up into admin. This is the only way for them to get a pay rise. Not good.
Don't build a pyramid, allow senior artists to get paid, and ensure that admin types do the admin side.

You can hire great art directors at lower levels than your senior artists, as they aren't "king of the castle" but steer the visual helm.

Anyway, lunch over... gotta get back to work!

Don't buy into the false economy!

*line. Not like. A production line

You can help support my personal economy for teaching here...

ko-fi.com/dellak

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