INTRODUCTION

Games are one of the most unpredictable media in today’s entertainment business. Programmers, artists and designers as a team are creating virtual playgrounds where players are able to escape and enjoy themselves, with a brief break from their real lives. Different from movies, a game is highly interactive and gives players the possibility to do what they feel is right at any particular moment. With the capabilities of today’s games, there are millions of unforeseen actions the player can do in this virtual playground, making it difficult to control and predict for the developers. This is why; I say it is a wonderful experience and an amazing challenge to be part of a game production team. It will definitely keep you engaged and alert at all the times.

The intention of this book is to give aspiring game artists an overview of what it is like to work in the game industry- methods for those working in the field, and techniques to help you gain speed and knowledge about various technical aspects. This includes how and what you should do to evolve as a game artist to be successful in your game career. This guidance will be useful for those who are taking formal 3D courses, and for those who are self-taught. With this book, I hope to give you the knowledge and drive needed to take the first step into the game industry, or to help you hone your career skills.

The games industry is moving at a fast pace on the hardware/graphics side, and the bridge between the graphics programmers and the artists is widening. Game productions are now more technical than ever, which can create problems for the artistic people who love to create art but do not want to be bothered with the technical aspects of a program. There is no escape; game artists need to understand what and why certain things are being done, and learn why they are used within a game development, so they can be fully functioning part of the team.

The future of gaming is exciting. The gap between content creation for film and game development has nearly closed, and it is becoming more important than ever for an artist to understand the technical challenges that will be faced in creating the next generation of games.

Once upon a time, there were low-polygon artists and film artists- not anymore. In the upcoming generation of game platforms, you will see characters rendered with hundreds of thousands of polygons, and levels with over 5 million polygons in a single field of view by normal maps and displacement. Finding talent to produce the level of quality needed for next-generation game development is getting increasingly difficult. Not only the aspects of model complexity are increasing, everything else is, too. Both shaders and animation are exploding into new realms, from facial animation to full-blown programmable shaders that previously could only be done with software renders. Now, shaders previously seen only in movies can all be done in real time. What this means is, if you want to make it into games industry, you have to be ready. Being ready is going to take time, hard work, and a passion for the industry. You have to be ready to learn as much you can about game development, because the more you know, the better you can be at your job. This doesn’t meant that, to be an artist, you need to know how to program. However, it does mean that it will help you a lot if you understand the technical challenges of the rest of your team. This will help you do your job better with greater efficiency. An example of this is normal mapping. This technique allows you to use a high-resolution model and map it to a lower polygon version with an associated normal map texture. The result is a low-polygon model that looks nearly the same as a model many times its polygon density- all through the use of shaders and textures. Knowing this technique as an artist will help you increase the quality of the game content, and allow you to understand the best workflow to get you there.

One method that can help to learn new methods is “Modding”. A mod is a modification to an existing game that alters content or game play. Mods are usually made by the community of game players to alter the game the way they want to play it. These gamers usually allow these mods to be downloaded for free. Before jumping into developing your game, you can develop a mod. It will be nice experience for you if you are an artist and a designer. You’ll wonder how miscellaneous game items went into pipeline to get into the game engine to form a game. Creating a mod is a great way to learn, and allows you to try new ideas and iterations quickly. One reason is that you are starting from a stable platform on which to iterate your ideas and try new approaches. It can quickly teach you about the process of exporting your data into special formats; special image formats used for memory allocation, and even different ways to UV your models for texture quality, normal map approaches, and performance. The simple process of creating a building and importing it into a mod can teach you a lot about workflow and how to improve it. Alternatively, even to learn how other titles do it differently. Most mod tools these days are the same tools that developers use to create game itself. Therefore, it is a valuable approach if you want to try new ideas or just to learn.

As game development team becomes more increasingly larger to meet the contents needs of, many small developers will soon need to find a home with larger developers to stay alive. Large developers often have the option of moving talent around between multiple titles as needed. While the amount of content increases for new titles, the budget barely moves. This means that companies are increasingly outsourcing content and only hiring a very talented core of individuals. This is where you come in, making it is more important than ever for you as an artist to increase your worth by improving your workflow, become more efficient, and to learn how to work together as a team to get the job done. This doesn’t mean that you have to work 12-hour shifts, it means that you have to learn more about the game development pipeline and to understand the challenges that lie ahead. It will definitely get you up and going, but it is going to take passion and eagerness to work as a team to keep you there.

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