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It's hardly a narrow field.

It's not narrow, it's concentrated. A lot of programmers can do a lot of different types of programming tasks. Many amateur projects have a single coder who handles every aspect of the game. That's all you need on the programming side; one programmer who knows all the stuff. A lot of the time having multiple programmers isn't a matter of necessity, it's just a means of speeding up how much physical work can be pumped out.
Like the AP says, he did "nuclear fuel production, banking, finance, telcom and [is now going to do] into medical...". That's a lot of different fields for one guy to cover. He's not a medical programmer, he's a "programmer" that is currently doing medical things. Game programmers often do the same thing but within the gaming sector. One guy can do the physics, the AI, the scripting, etc.

There is no hard boundaries to programming, it's based off knowledge and logic, you just need to know the subject and the syntax. Any raw talent in programming can generally be applied no matter what sort of programming it is. You can sit down, read a physics book, and put those formulas into action. Then you can read about the processes involved with a neural network and implement them. Can I sit down, brush some strokes, and make a great painting? I have absolutely no talent with a brush and all the technical learning in the world isn't going to save me.

I admit programming is getting a lot more specialized than it used to be, but it's happenning at the professional level and this topic is referring to the amateur level. At the amateur level it takes one programmer to program a game, whereas artists tend to be specialized even when starting out. I do environmental art, and if I'm on a team project that's all I'm expected to do. A coder on an amateur project is expected to be able to do a greater variety of things if not everything and if he can't, he's expected to be able to learn it.

So when one programmer starts making a game, he looks for a group of artists. Hence why it feels like there are not enough of them.

Funny you should post this as I am a 3d artist, and just started on the developmet side.
http://www.microcyb.com/?g=e&e=2
http://www.microcyb.com/?g=e&e=9

I can make all the fun 3D objects and have all those fun toys, but until just now have started to play with the coding aspect of it.

Hi there. As being a hobby artist myself, I think I can tell you a few things which people on this forum simply seem to not know. Read on, you might just find this info helpful!

If you look at the general public, and imagine how many of all people enjoy to program games.
And then you imagine how many enjoys to draw.

How can it be that there is such a shortage for artists then??

Then realise that the people who like to draw, and those who like to program... they go to different places online.

You can simply google for some artists, even amateurs like myself somteimes happen have their own websites.
But if you want the easy road, there's a whole bunch of online artist communities around, just try to find an artist there.

Like most others, many artists enjoy online communities. Some of them are pro's, and want a thousand bucks for a canvas with some oil on it... others hardly have the dream to ever get to earn any money from something they draw.

Just like with game programmers, there are
pro's - dont want to have anything to do with anyone calling themselves amateurs.
wannabe's - tries to accomplish something which actually works.

And everyyyyyyything in between. Myself, I'm the sort that charges 40 bucks per portrait. However, that is not what I wrote this post for.
What I was going for... is:

GameDev.net = claim to have 200.000 frequent users - yeah, right!

ElfWood = 25.000 fantasy/sci-fi artists of all qualities mentioned above. (but they're not LIMITED to fantasy and such)

DeviantArt = Unknown number of artists, but most likely around 75-150.000. In all categories, including photographers, icon-makers and "Windows Skin"-makers.

Renderocity = 170.000 frequent artists (280.000 members) also a good community but I'm not familiar with it myself. Holds artists of any kind.

Epilogue.net = 2.500 EXTREMELY talented fantasy/sci-fi artists. You might wanna have money in your pockets before you check up on these.



I listed them in order of accessability, and likeliness of scoring. Only the huge "Renderocity" requires you to become a member to browse among the artists.

I think I might make this a new thread on this forum. Perhaps on the "Help Wanted" forum.
Hope this helped someone!
~NQ
[edit: fixed the links]

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Original post by LockePick So when one programmer starts making a game, he looks for a group of artists. Hence why it feels like there are not enough of them.

Yep. Especially if you think about the content side of today's game: it seems that it took more time to create Morrowind's world than to create the program itself. In the future, we'll continue to improve quality of immersion. The coder part will become harder (more math, more tricks and so on). But it will require a lot of artist work.

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Sorry, i couldn't disagree more! Painting and drawing and modeling are skills just like programming. They can be learned just like programming.

(I will expose here what I think about this subject. If you do not agree, please PM me - unless you think that it is relevant to the discussion, of course :) For now, I replied to the forum because I thought that this has something to do with the lack of artist and the increasing number of programmers. Of course, I may be wrong, and dOOOhg will just kill me for the thread hijack :/)

I used to speak with graphists, illustrators, comics makers, painters, photographs of all sorts (I love art, and there is a lot of art galleries where I live). I believe art is innate. It is a particular vision of a world. You cannot learn to see the world in a particular way, because you are limited by your own experience. I could try to draw men and women for years, I'll never be more than a monkey which actually reproduce something uninterressting, while an entry-level artist will draw an interresting character in a few minutes.

Cuting edge programming is still programming. Programming is somewhat accurately defined by "writing a sequence of instruction which is interpreted by the computer to apply a treatment on a set of informations" (that's why, here, in France, we call this "informatique", which is a contraction of "information" and "automatique" - the latter is the science field which deals with automatas). Most game programmers out there aren't doing anything else, leaving the Big Part to their lead programmer (which are as rare as lead artists in the industry). In fact, most programmers do the "writing a sequence of instruction" part, leaving the creation of the treatment to someone with better qualifications.

About creativity now : I think that programming has nothing to do with creativity. Creativity is used to create an algorithm - and an algorithm is a mathematic object, not a computer object. Of course, some programmers do create algorithms - I said some, not all. Again, AFAIK a lot of fellow programmers are only writing data flow, leaving the hard data treatment algorithm to a specialist. Creativity is also used to design a solution - but again, this is not the mid-level programmer's job.

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I wouldn't say that one was harder than the other. It's likely that we are each pre-diposed to being better at something though our individual talents. But to develop that natural talent into into being great at something? That takes a lot of effort.

This is true too :)

Have a good night,

I've been drawing and stuff since I was in 5th grade, and I went through 4 years of magnet art school, so I may not be the most unbiased person on this subject. I feel that programming and art are more alike than people think.

It takes a good period of time to get into both before you can do anything worthwhile.

Game artists, as far as I can see, also need to be as much of a jack of all trades as programmers. Artists should know modelling, texturing, animating, UV mapping, rigging, etc. Just like a programmer can pick up a physics book to get that down if he isn't specialized in it, an artist can learn to animate. He may not be the best animator from the beginning, but being as he already has a good understanding of the software, it shouldn't be difficult to get reasonable results.

For programming you are organizing commands in such an order that it gets the computer to do what you want. For artists, you are organizing vertices, edges, texture, color, lighting and animation in such a way that it look pleasing and functional (and relevant to the title).

One thing I saw written was that game programmers are pretty concentrated in what they do and artists have many different fields. You are comparing apples to oranges. If you compare GAME programmers to GAME artists then it severely limits what is being done.

I haven't been to those sites, but I know the best game artist communities I've found are at www.polycount.com www.cgchat.com and www.cgtalk.com