Hello, I was wondering if any programmers, or artists in the games industry could answer a question for me? I am an artist for a games development company. In general, I do about 10% artwork, or creative activities, and the rest of what I do is exporting items for programmers, editing viewcone data, or whatever the programmers want us to do. This is true of our entire artist team. I was wondering if this is standard throughout the industry? As in is only doing 10% artwork normal when you''re an artist? Thank you for your time

Yeah i''d like to know too.

Yeah i''d like to know too.

The proportion varies from team to team, but yes: you will have to play with in-house tools a lot no matter who you''re working for. Packages like 3DS MAX, Maya and so forth are designed for linear media such as TV and movies. Games aren''t linear, so the data these packages produce must be massaged to fit our needs.

This only changes when you work in a really big team where specialisation makes more sense. (I.e., there''d be someone dedicated to collecting, exporting and cleaning up all the artwork so that it''s in a format suitable for the programmers to work with.)

More experienced teams will write plugins for the art tools (usually 3DS MAX, since this package is a lot more open to expansion like this). The advantages of this are many. Firstly, artists can produce models in a form as close the final requirements as possible, since the exporter would be written in-house and adapted to your game''s needs. A second advantage is that a smooth workflow makes for fewer bottlenecks during development. Finally, it improves morale: artists are doing art; programmers are writing code instead of answering ''dumb questions'' about some obscure conversion tool they wrote months ago, and designers can work directly with the game to tweak its gameplay in-situ.

That said, 10% seems rather low. It may be that the tools, which I assume are probably custom ones built by the programmers, could need reworking. It''s unlikely this will happen at this stage in development as time is probably tight.

Wisdom is just experience by another name. The only difference between a newbie and a guru is that the guru has had the opportunity to learn from many more mistakes. Someone in your team should be taking notes on the current workflow problems and suggest ways of improving the development processes so that as little time as possible is wasted in your next project.

quote: Original post by Dak
Hello, I was wondering if any programmers, or artists in the games industry could answer a question for me?

I am an artist for a games development company. In general, I do about 10% artwork, or creative activities, and the rest of what I do is exporting items for programmers, editing viewcone data, or whatever the programmers want us to do. This is true of our entire artist team. I was wondering if this is standard throughout the industry? As in is only doing 10% artwork normal when you''re an artist?

Thank you for your time

10% in artwork?.. of course not.

Take note that drawing and animated is considered part of artistic job. For example, if you made a 3d models, then you need to made some animation, and finally you have a complete models.
Even more, script job is also a artistic job (such level designer). Even if you work only with code and numbers, it still is a artistic job.

In opposite, programmer job, will involment almost all with c++ (or some programming language), the rest of the work is part of the artist.




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