#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

All proceeds will go to me living in a late stage capitalist hellscape

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Delaney King 👩🏻

Delaney King 👩🏻 Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @delaneykingrox

Mar 18
#gamedev #gameart advice. I see a lot of students making levels as one big mesh in 3d apps.
Environments are usually made up from what are usually called "kits" of modular pieces.
Here is some of the kits for Hitman taken from their talk (link shortly). ImageImageImage
Learning to plan out and make modular kits is super important part of your skill set. Designing modules that are reusable and reskinnable makes a huge difference to your workflow.

You can buy various kits on asset stores that you can look at to get ideas.
Read 8 tweets
Mar 17
Today's #gamedev tip. Sometimes scenes can get very visually busy, and it can slow down game designers trying to tune stuff or find problems like collision gaps or triggers in the wrong place.

You can set up the ability to instantly switch your scene to a design friendly mode-
Which hides all the art assets and instead shows simple block geometry that represents collision, materials based on physics, grid textures and 'helper' objects like text notes, arrows and snap points.

To set this up, ensure every asset in the level is inside a prefab/blueprint.
This allows you to include hidden 'helper' meshes with tags or layers to reveal them and a script to turn them on or off when the game runs.
You can also sit your collision on these objects, allowing you to reuse them and switch out the artwork for variations.
Read 8 tweets
Mar 8
I often get asked what software and tools one needs to be a 3d game artist.
These days, my answer is massively different to what it was before.

Here is my definitive list:
1. Blender 3D.

Amazing even myself, the poor yokel of 3D packages has come of age. Forget crushing fees to Autodesk, this package now has everything a game artist needs to kick start their career and it is free (though I recommend donating some money to their team).
1(cont) Blender massively updated their clunky old UI, and as a result the product has gone from strength to strength in a very short time.
You can model, sculpt, bake, hand paint textures, animate and build shader graph materials that display correctly in the viewport.
Read 14 tweets
Mar 8
An NFT isn't the picture itself, it is just a link, password and receipt for a picture stored somewhere.

A receipt that costs an immense amount of fossil fuel power and generates stupid amounts of heat to feed the computers worldwide that only VERIFY your receipt exists.
You are burning massive resources just so a sea of computers can keep checking to see if you still are a total wanker.

Your art is still utterly copyable, reproducible, hackable and will vanish if the linked resources break- just like any cheesy old web link.
If you would like to support artists, buy the art itself. You can buy the physical original, signed numbered prints, or even buy the rights to reproduction.

It pretty much nothing to keep an actual work of art in environmental impact.
Read 7 tweets
Mar 6
Translating red flag terms
"Woke" = not about white straight men.

"Politically correct" = not about white straight men.

"Cancel Culture" = I am facing repercussions for being a terrible human being.

"Too political" = not about white straight men.
Translating other red flag terms:

"Underage woman" = child.

"My Freedoms" = I am a spoiled selfish child who doesn't care about anyone else's safety.

"Good Old Days" = when everything was entitely about straight white men.

"Family values" = I am a homophobe.
"One bad apple" = I am comfortable with the current level of corruption as it benefits me.

"Privatise" = steal public resources for me/my mates.

"Edgy/provocative comedy" = for the consumption of straight men.

"Pandering to" = not for consumption of straight men.
Read 8 tweets
Mar 3
J'Ak Chi'Ck!
It just works
Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(