Introduce yourself.

Save your questions for the end or speak to me when I come round and visit you.

The quality bar is so high and expectations will only get higher every year. Just

compare the quality between Uncharted 2 and 3.

1. You may need to move to a city/town with no friends or family in. Take that

opportunity now not later. Good preparation for your careers long term goal.

2. Your boss may ask you to stay late… maybe without being paid. Taking one for

the team can be expected… more often that is desired.

3. You may be asked to write design documents to be outsourced to China. You

may be asked to retopologise horrid models, only to do it again the next week

because the design has changed.

4. You never know, you might actually be working with them someday, or they could

have the power of convincing an art director of employing you. Power of word of

mouth is very strong. Aim high, stay humble

5. You may see people bust out a sculpt in an evening and you can too with enough

hours put in. You‟ll get faster with enough time. 6. If you’re not doing your passion then go and do something else immediately. If you want

the money, go work in banking because people choose to be an artist because they love their work more than trying to make a million bucks.

7. You’re going to change many things so deal with it. For example, I worked on this one building and probably redid it about 30 times with hundreds of comments over the duration of over a year due to design developments.

It‟s really a test of your desire and willpower to compete. It‟s a contest against other

artists in the world to get good work which is rewarding.

Show of hands who participates in fitness weekly?

What gets you through your session? Straining to do that last set at the gym or last

600m in the pool? Take that willpower and apply it to your work. It‟s character

building.

If you‟re not failing now, then you‟re not pushing yourself hard enough. Every time you

repeat a process you‟ll improve every time.

You‟ve spent 9 grand on this course, so don‟t waste your money.

1. Your main objective is to get a job. Use what knowledge you have of the tools you have access to get the best results you can. Leave all other luxurious R&D until after you graduate and you afford the time to expand your skillset.

2. If you have the opportunity to meet other artists then take it. 3DS London was on once a month (they now have a meetup page), and I met some people who gave me an interview. Also you learn from what others are doing. More about this on the next slide. Concept artists, there are industry workshops in London yearly.

3. Work a solid 10 hours a day where you can to maximise every moment you have. Obviously take breaks where needed, and exercise to keep your body healthy, even if it’s a walk to the shops.

4. However you go about producing your content, master your pipeline before expanding. Concentrate on getting the best results.

5. A good tip is to use more textures of smaller resolutions, especially when it involves alphas. You wouldn’t want to waste a fourth 2k texture channel on a little alpha for one bit. Chunk it off for it’s own map. Split maps up according to how they may LOD. Take a vehicle LOD, when that goes the interior will be culled, so you would take graphics memory by culling the interior texture if that was on it’s own sheet too.

6. For portfolio work, you want it to look amazing which is fair enough, but in practice you’ll end up working with heavy restrictions. Here’s why 4k textures are expensive.

7. Our skills aren’t going away just yet with the power that Virtual Reality demands, the hunger for performance requires us to keep to restrictions for a little while yet. Then people will want 4k gaming.

8. Learning from your mistakes is one thing, but sharing them with your friends helps them and reiterates the point again.

9. The full production every artist follows is the thought process of idea, to massing it out, and then detailing. Even if it’s a sketch, there’s a loose flow and suggestion to each of those steps. For the majority of things there is a right way. Don’t use ‘artistic license’ as a scapegoat, you’re lying to yourself, so go back and repeat the exercise.

Everyone should have an account on at least one of the top art communities out

there.

Developing students and professionals alike are on here, sharing and learning

together.

You need to be part of this to stay in the loop of news. Start a thread as it provides

you with that motivation to deliver, or post to WAYWO

After all it‟s free crit. Embrace it, and stay professional.

I dislike the term „next gen‟, as people often refer to that generation being now. It‟s a

marketing cliché which has caught on but commonly inaccurately used.

8th gen is Xbox One and PS4.

The real expense is in the UVs where seams add to the vertex count, which is

ultimately what is read by the engine not polys or triangles.

We say triangles as it‟s easy for us to benchmark.

You need to know exactly what you‟re going to make, and you‟re not better than

mother nature so study your subject matter as much as you can. Collating it

altogether from the huge variety of sources we have can be done using 2 of my

favourite tools.

Kuadro links your local images into a mood board so you can display them on your

reference monitor. It saves the arrangement and sizes, with no borders so you can

get maximum viewing with no flicking through on Picasa.

Pinterest is also great, especially for collaborative projects.

It‟s normally safer to take an existing concept (one that works) to start from than

concept everything from scratch. Also if it‟s in pop culture, people get a pleasant „OH I

CAN RELATE‟ feeling which gives you an extra brownie point.

Tumblr has some good blogs, with great references, get on it if you‟re not.

Of course, first hand reference is the best if you can have access to that source. For

example one of my projects was a rollercoaster docking bay inside of a cargo plane. I

went to both an airbase for the exact aircraft I was making and a theme park for the

docking bay photography reference.

1. Begin with blocking out all of the proportions of the asset.

2. The more effort you put into modelling at this stage, the better your end results will

be.

3. I prefer to work in Zbrush for everything I do. The toolkit is flexible and the

processing it can handle is far superior than any other program… once you learn it‟s

nature.

4. Have one master file in which gives you an overview of how it should look after

baking

5. You‟ll save lots of time especially on 4k anti aliasing bakes.

6. I like to do details like nuts and bolts in Painter as it‟s quicker. Anything that can be

projected on like decals.

Having a method of tracking your larger assets can be useful, it aids in self time

management.

For me, this is something that is tweaked all the time. But what I‟m showing here is a

good solid basis for how I manage my personal projects.

I begin with the project folder being the date and name.

The rest is straight forward, always exported data to the export folder which means

there is no such thing as a FINAL VERSION…. Consider submitted version.

Always refer to the latest version if you want to say final.

CL for clone, meshes retopoed from Zbrush

GR for game res, it‟s cleaned from Zbrush and Uvd.

HP is for high poly.

It‟s good to note I have versions within these folders such as v01, v02 as you never

know when you‟ll need to roll back.

Texture bakes for where my sources go, and published is where they go when I‟m run

them through my last phases in Painter and/or Photoshop.

As part of the planning, I go over my references and look at every single material ID

I‟m going to have for the model.

I‟ll write a list with the values I‟ll poly paint them into my high poly.

This may seem like a lot of effort, but it makes your texturing job so much easier and

faster, and you can be more accurate working with points than on 2D in Photoshop.

Again, spend lots of time making that high poly look great so when you come to

Painter you‟ll only be tweaking materials and small details.

If you‟re actually using your polypaint for albedo information, then use layers to

alternate between albedo and material IDs.

Subdivision modelling has the largest benefit of stepping down your levels and getting

a near perfect base to work with for your low poly.

Specifically, the low poly is practically made if you make your model with Zmodeller.

Begin with UV master (nothing about Uvs at this point), and „Work on Clone‟. This

makes a new white subtool you can do what you want with.

You can specify loops to be constructed with the topology brush for faces for

example.

And it‟s great for hard surface too all you have to do is append new Zsphere and open

the topology palette and click away with symmetry mode on, there‟s no need to

decimate, export and import into another package.

You can see here all I had to do was step it down to the lowest level, remove a few

loops, and a couple loops in and fix the end.

Quad off cylindrical ends so that they‟re clean.

Polygroups are extremely powerful and should be used where possible. In this

example I would want to make everything into one polygroup using „Group Visible‟

otherwise you‟ll get multiple meshes in your package which require an extra step to

join back together.

However, this can be very useful for unwrapping. If your polygroups are UV island

bound, then leave them on when you export and you can blitz your unwrapping. Just

remember to weld them when you‟ve finished Uving.

Creases don‟t require to be cleaned up, so it‟s ready for UVing in another package

Something which UV checkerboards don‟t visualise are orientations which is crucial

for certain materials such as wood.

You need to adhere to the same rule for every component because if one is going up

and the other is going down, then rotating the material won‟t fix it.

Here, this UV island needs to be rotated 90 degrees to agree to the post part of the

asset, it‟s simply a case of trial and error when going back and forth, but keep that in

mind when unwrapping.

Fear not, with proceduralism, it‟s minimal time wasted as it‟s just a re-packing and

rebaking job. No Photoshop fix ups.

As you probably know, save space and time by only doing one element and copying

that one element so that…

When you come to baking you‟ll want to group all of these islands together when you

pack, which hasn‟t been done as highlighted here.

When you‟re happy with your entire sheet, only Uvs between 0 and 1 space get

baked, so at this point ungroup your islands, and offset by 1 on all of the duplicates.

I suggest using scripts or the functions in your program of choice to select the

overlapping UVs

Using a cage on everything will improve the quality of your bakes.

The left image shows no cage being used, and the tangent normals of the game res

mesh are being used to project the high poly data.

As you can see you get discontinuities and repeated details, whereas in the right

image a cage fixes those 2 issues (assuming the cage is tight and not overlapping

itself).

Aside from having awesome edges and details, baking high poly flat normals is

important too.

You get better smoothed normals than you would from the geometry normals of the

game res mesh, particularly when it comes to specular reflections it becomes

noticeable.

Wavy normals – unwrap cylinders linearly. Also helps anti-aliasing.

It‟s all in the unwrap with this common error. Unwrap cylindrical objects linearly. Don‟t

unwrap those circles (unless capped ends) in a flower fashion.

Try to imagine how the cage is projecting the two meshes together.

Read everything on the Polycount Wiki.

My baking tool of choice is Designer, because of it‟s flexibility.

I can link all my high poly meshes, my game res mesh and it‟s cage; in which I can

generate all of my maps from easily.

In this example a turret component is shown, but I can add together as many

components by doing this process for each component and using the normal combine

node to string them together.

Once the system is set up it‟s much quicker to tweak than say an xNormal or

Max/Maya pipeline. If your lead tells you to change a component, you don‟t have to

bake out everything. There‟s minimal loss of time (as it will happen… a lot).

This is component explosion baking. It‟s up to you to analyse your model and decide

how to chunk it so that you wont get errors. If you get getting cage overlapping errors

then split it up further.

This is where versioning truly shines. Don‟t embed any meshes in the file, simply link

them to a location (same with the bakes). When you need to get latest, you simply

relocate to the new location preserving the old work in case you have to roll back, and

that happens too!

This is the end of the pipeline where you‟d take your substances and apply them to

the vertex IDs created from zBrush or masked in Max.

Take the rest of your input bakes and apply them so they‟re used in your layers when

called upon.

Then finally add those details such as decals and bolts in the 3D view. Ctrl + Shift + E

to export those maps ready for the shader.

It started with Pixar when they made their rendering engine Renderman. Since film and games are ever more merging our laws and tools than before, we’re adapting to this universal standard.

To name just a few tools, Quixel, Allegorithmic , Marmoset and engines, UE4, Unity, Cryengine are all adhering to this standard.

It’s a different system of portraying materials. It breaks it down into a more accurate way to work with any material, even if the art is cell-shaded like in Windwaker, it would still abide by the same principles.

To convert your existing diffuse, normal and specular maps to the 4 PBR maps that

I‟m going to discuss is really easy. There‟s a node in Designer which simply converts

them and you‟ll get ok results for backwards engineering generic materials.

So the first difference is how we author our diffuse maps, now known as base colour

or albedo maps.

If you‟re still hand authoring them in Photoshop, then AO shouldn‟t appear in the base

colour map to the extreme of blacks as seen in the right hand image.

If you‟re using Substance Painter to compile your input bakes (including AO and

cavity) and substance materials to produce your material, then you need to tweak a

few parameters.

You may be wondering, well how does it look at nice without the AO and cavity

detail? Well you can see still suggestions of it which will work in all lighting scenarios,

but shadows never come out black.

If the shader can afford the expense, you may be allowed to use the AO input slot in

the engine.

This will adjust the opacity across the map according the lighting setup, brilliant for

that self-shadowing on minute details.

Roughness replaces the “specular” map from the old system and is greyscale. It

controls the glossiness of the material, which is the inverse of roughness.

So if you see glossiness like in Marmoset, you can invert it (or just click the invert

button).

Notice the size of the highlight getting larger and smaller throughout the linear scale

of 0 to 1.

It makes it much more easier to work with than a 0-255 scale (which then later turns

into 0-255 as an output map).

Sebastian Lagarde at Dontnod went out and accurately measured real world values

(mostly of metals) during the creation of Remember Me for their material system.

This chart has been widely referenced and I suggest you Google „PBR Chart‟ and use

it when you‟re recreating specific metals such as brass, titanium, copper and so on.

Notice how the glossiness highlight size doesn‟t change, but the presence of the

environment map increases.

It‟s good to note at this point that the specular slot still exists as reflecting colour from

the material as a source will still apply to a select few materials such as precious

gems.

Here is an asset, a quarter of a platform which I‟ll show you the map breakdown for.

So we’re looking at the raw pixel colour information if you isolate all of the other material’s properties.

Then white is metallic, and black isn’t metallic. This is normally an silhouetted island looking map, with dust layers bringing those whites to light greys.

Similar principle with white being rough / matte, and black being glossy.

Normal and height maps haven‟t affected the PBR pipeline with regards to artist

production.

There‟s perhaps a bit more height map involvement before the end result of a normal

map is processed.

1. Read everything that Marmoset have put together on PBR. They‟ve left out the

unnecessary complex math and give it to your straight and concise. It‟s brilliant.

2. There are 2 PDFs which are also a must read from Allegorithmic

3. Working examples which help

4. Everything else

1. You need that impact. The best you got. On average someone will look at your folio

for about 20-30 seconds and generally no longer than a minute as they have so many

to get through. ADs are very busy

2. Include your name or URL on every image discreetly, as it could be saved locally to

their computer. If someone wants to track you then it‟s much easier to look in the

lower corner for a URL than reverse image search.

3. Video content shows so much that images can‟t. However be careful, I don‟t want

motion sickness. Fewest keyframes as possible to do the job. And fix their tangents!

Keep your cameras simple, smooth and tell a story with your work if you can, without

it dragging on.

4. A good page hierarchy is to have a project per page.

5. From that last point, have all of that content scrollable is the preferred method that

people like.

6. Take your environment with a label image and within that page will be your

presentation shots to capture them, then the asset breakdown, flythrough, wireframe,

maybe a high poly image, texture sheets and marmoset viewer for your hero asset

too.

7. Hosting on IMGUR is a great service and one I would recommend. Many others are

decent too.

8. For no more than 6 pounds for 2 years you can get a .co.uk domain, which can be

directed through a provider such as Weebly. It makes you look much more

professional.

9. Keeping it updated as much as possible is important, so show your work in

progresses, making sure you‟ve labelled it a WIP!

10. Google yourself. Employers will do a background check if they are serious about

you, which may include a Google. So make sure your nightclub photos aren‟t public

and your ranting blog doesn‟t interfere.

1. Watermarks are a sign of unprofessionalism as their over distracting and

pointless. It‟s highly unlikely that a professional artist will steal your work and

claim is as theirs. Use a minute signature somewhere discrete on your image if

you really want to sign it.

2. You‟re only as good as your worst work, and your judgement will be questioned if

you include bad work with your good work.

3. It needs to super simple for someone to navigate and not have an unnecessary

amount of pages, as I said before scrolling is the preference

4. Making people wait to even see your art is awful. Loose the flash if you‟re on WIX

and stick to PNGs straight up, no transitions on something like Carbonmade or

Weebly.

5. No waffle please. The only thing I want to see is your art. If I care about you, I‟ll

read about you on your „About‟ page and CV.

6. No over the top logos with your name on, or giving your portfolio a metal theme.

You want all the attention on your art. You can‟t be criticised for just typing your

name and job title, unless you format it awfully.

I would consider there to be 4 main trees which umbrella specialist art roles.

Ultimately this doesn‟t mean much later on in your career, as you‟ll know enough to

jump around but I believe it‟s good for developing artists.

Specialise and produce content in your chosen tree and become a master of one to

improve the chances of getting that role, especially in a larger company.

When it comes to indies and smaller companies however this guidance tends to lose

it‟s validity due to the nature of working as a generalist you‟ll cover multiple roles.

Ultimately, the best advice I can give is to make whatever the hell you want. That

freedom and judgement in all the choices you make defines you as an artist; and if

someone likes what you produce in your portfolio enough to employ you, then there‟s

a good chance you‟ll enjoy working there.

1. The major design principle can be applied here too. Raw information, with no

padding out waffle text. No images, just raw facts and accurate data showing off

the best you‟ve achieved (which is relevant)

2. Which means no „runner up at my local pub quiz award 2008‟ – save those little

award things for the interview if the conversation goes that way

3. Yes you‟re going to have to use simple fonts, this isn‟t a place to be arty, but you

can make it sophisticated. Spacings are important too, if you need more room

then go into 2 pages, but try to keep it to one page.

4. Experience is gold on your CV. Keep it straight after a brief introduction to

yourself. Then your shining achievements, then everything else can follow

5. When you send your CV off, write a personalised cover letter. This shows that you

actually care about working there. Drop in some facts about the company to make

them feel special that you‟ve bothered to research them. You are your own

salesman, tell them why they should hire you without sounding arrogant.

6. I‟ve seen traffic light systems, star rankings of all the sort when people rate

themselves on how well they can use software. It‟s bollocks for their ego. I see the

use it so I use 3 terms. Very proficient = A main tool I use a lot, super fast.

Proficient = I can work my way around it, but I‟m not as fast in other tools. Working

knowledge = I can work my way around some things with the help of Google. It‟s

mainly to see if you‟re Max/Maya, Zbrush/Mudbox etc.

1. Contact information at the top, you can include your phone number and LinkedIn if

you wish. Don‟t put your house address on your CV if it‟s going publicly online.

2. Keep it snappy and light. Don‟t ramble on about how much you love your cats.

Make yourself interesting, show your passion for video games.

3. The gold if you have it. If not then skip this. Leave off shelf stacking at Tesco if this

is your game art CV.

4. Begin with your highest qualification, such as your Game Art degree. If your prior

qualifications like A-Levels are relevant include those too, otherwise leave

everything else off.

5. I like to bullet point these for digestion. Expand on the skills within your field.

Essentially the job requirements on a well written posting in reverse. Don‟t word

them so similarly.

6. Technical limitations is something they need to consider. If you don‟t know it, don‟t

add it.

1. It can be scary walking into their territory feeling so insignificant and like you

shouldn‟t belong there. Then there‟s like 3 of them talking to you at once listening

to every word you say. They want to see if you will fit into their team. Stay chatty

but avoid taking control over the conversation, pause so they can dive in and get

onto their next point.

2. They‟ll always be hungry for more. If you have a real world model or other

traditional art which is worthy of showing then bring it in. They may ask for

sketchbooks, but only show what you‟re happy in showing. Prepare for this.

3. Write down a list before hand of questions you want answered. Avoid lingering on

pay and benefits for too long and show interest in how they operate as a team and

the work you‟ll be doing.

4. We‟re not a suit and tie job role, so anticipate your interview could be on a sofa.

5. If you show any disinterest in working with them or their team it could cost you the

job. They want someone who has the enthusiasm to carry out the work 6. This applies to general art crit too, but embrace it, analyse it and use it. Don’t let your ego

get in the way of furthering yourself.