• Ian McQue
  (tags: Art sketchbook)
• Toks
  (tags: Art sketchbook)
• wood’n'art
  (tags: Art sketchbook)
• James Edwards Online
  (tags: Art)

A common question asked of me, and of many others on various game art websites from people considering or wanting a career making games is “How much should I be earning?”

The answer is rarely directly given - for one thing it is such a subjective area (experience and location are just two factors), and secondly it’s never been considered polite to disclose how much you make - this is true in many vocations.

So why is it so hard to give a figure? It depends on too many factors - your experience, your age and your previous salary all matter (as well as how well you do in the interview, and how much you ask for), the location of the company (a higher cost of living generally means a compensatory increase in salary), and how well the company is doing (if they have limited cashflow, they don’t want to spend it on you). You also have to take into account other benefits you may or may not get - will you get bonuses? Are they one off completion bonuses, or linked to sales? Will you get health insurance? Life insurance? A pension?

So again you ask, how much will you make? Game Developer Research might be a good place to start - they do a yearly census to try and get as much information as possible. Gamasutra also published the results of the 2006 survery online.

The 2006 average for artists was $65,107, again basically flat on 2005, though average salaries of experienced lead artists and animators rose the most. The game designers’ average was $61,538, with salaries scaling within a $5,000 range over the last 3 years over all experience levels.

In other categories, production personnel in America had an average salary of $77,131 in 2006, Q/A’s average decreased to $37,861, the average audio employee was paid $69,935, and business & legal personnel came out on top with an average $95,596 salary last year.

As for the regional variations for the survey, which polled 5,600 readers of Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra.com and attendees of Game Developers Conference, California had the top worldwide average salary for game professionals in 2006, followed by Washington, Oregon, and Georgia, with Texas rounding out the top 5.

Of course, those are AVERAGE salaries, and are therefore not as meaningful as they could be to someone seeking an entry level position. Those figures also all in $US, and I live in the UK which currently has a very strong currency compared to the currently weaker $US.

So again you ask, how much will you make? This is where I got out on a limb and use REAL figures for two currencies, for entry level positions. You’ll have read all the above and know that there are myriad factors which alter these figures:

• UK entry level salary, 2007 : £18-21k
• US entry level salary, 2007 : $33-40k

Don’t shoot me if you don’t get paid that.

Now, another factor is how much your salary would increase, but that also depends on many factors, such the games you release, company growth, personal growth and negotiation skills - and this is a discussion perhaps best left for another time.

Update from Game Career Guide, September 2008: The paycheck: How much to expect

As an entry-level game developer, how much money can you really expect to make?

Game Developer magazine has been collecting data annually from professional game-makers for seven years, and the editors (myself among them) have shared much of that information exclusively with GameCareerGuide.com for the past three years.

Previously, I’ve explained that it is very difficult to answer the question “How many polygons should I be using in a character/vehicle/environment?” This doesn’t stop the question being asked however, so I thought I’d approach it in a different way - how many polygons have other games used?

By listing the game, the hardware it runs on, and any art information I could find, I hope that this will be a good starting point as to suitable polygon counts and texture sizes. Ideally I’d like to list as many games as possible, from different genres and platforms.

This is very much a work in progress, and if you haven’t read my previous thoughts on the “How many polygons?”, I suggest you do check it out.

So, I’ll warn casual readers again - the number of polygons used don’t matter if they are not used well. This is simply a technical markerpost to try and identify what certain games used on certain hardware at a certain time. Supposedly Halo 2 used less polygons for Masterchief than Halo 1, and I’ve heard that Call of Duty 4 used less polygons for the character models that CoD2 did - I suspect this will due to relying more heavily on normal mapping to create the details.

Gears of War, Xbox 360, 2006 (according to D’Artiste book)

Wretch - 10,000 polygons with diffuse, specular and normal maps

Boomer - 11,000 polygons with diffuse, specular and normal maps

Marcus - 15,000 polygons with diffuse, specular and normal maps

GTA San Andreas, PS2, 2004

Characters - 2,000 polygons with 1 256×256 8bit texture

NPCs - 1,200 polygons with 1 256×128 8bit texture

GTA IV, Xbox 360/PS3, 2008

Story Characters - 8-10,000 polygons with multiple 256×256/512×512 diffuse, specular and normal maps

NPCs - 3-4,000 polygons with multiple textures

Half-Life, PC, 1998

Zombie - 844 polygons

High Definition pack Zombie- 1700 polygons

Halflife 2, PC, 2004

Alyx Vance - 8323 polygons

Barney - 5922 polygons

Combine Soldier - 4682 polygons

Buggy (without mounted gun) - 5824 polygons

Classic Headcrab - 1690 polygons

SMG - 2854 polygons (with arms)

Pistol - 2268 polygons (with arms)

Halo, Xbox, 2001

Masterchief - 2,000 polygons

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, GC, 2002

Link - 2800 polygons

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, GC/Wii, 2006

Link - 6900 polygons

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, PS2, 2005

Snake - 4,000 polygons

Project Gotham Racing 2, Xbox, 2003

Vehicles - 10,000 polygons

Project Gotham Racing 3, Xbox 360, 2006

Vehicles - 80,000-100,000 polygons

Quake, PC, 1996

200 polygons with 1 320×200 8bit texture using predefined palette.

Quake 4, PC, 2006

Player model - 2,500 polygons with multiple diffuse, specular and normal maps

Resident Evil 4, Gamecube, 2005

Leon - 10,000 polygons

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, PS3, 2007

Main characters - ~20,000-30,000 polygons

Drake - ~30,000 polygons

Pirates - ~12,000-15,000 polygons

Unreal Tournament, PC, 1999

Player model - 800 polygons

Unreal Tournament 2k3, PC, 2003

Player model - 3,000 polygons

Unreal Tournament 3, PC, 2007

Weapon models - 4,500 to 12,000 triangles for the first person view

Please feel free to add QUALIFIED information in the comments, or drop me an email with information that you think deserves to be here..

Technorati Tags: polycount, how many polygons

I’ve been meaning for a while to recommend books on RSArt - books that I own personally or have at work, books that I think are useful to games artists. Since I am predominantly a character artist, I suspect that most of the books I own and thus recommend will be character based too.

I’ll start by recommending Stop Staring by Jason Osipa. Stop Staring, whilst targeted towards Maya users, is an incredibly useful book for learning good facial topology no matter what package you use. It explains how expressions are constructed, and covers important aspects in facial animation such as what you should leave OUT of an animation, as well as what you need to actually animate.

This book however is not for total beginners (although I’m sure that you’d still learn something useful). However if you have some limited knowledge and want to improve your understanding of facial animation, then I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Technorati Tags: facial animation, jason osipa, stop staring

As an artist working with a team of others in the games industry, you will no doubt be using a content management system, and one of the most common in the market today for artists is Alienbrain by Avid/SoftImage.

Alienbrain is very powerful system, but for a new artist it can be a daunting application. The purpose of this post is to break it down to the core elements, the information that you’ll want to know on your first day at work when you’re confronted with it for the first time. To be perfectly honest, it may well be enough information for most artists for the majority of the time they use it.

What is it?
In many respects Alienbrain is like a version of Windows Explorer with added file protection/sharing/backup functionality. It allows users to share a file, but prevents several people from editing a file at the same time. It’s a content management system that backs up everything you choose from your hard disk to a central server. Alienbrain also stores a copy of every change to a file when you save a file, or “Check In”, to Alienbrain.

This means several things - since the files are stored on a central server, any artist on your team can edit art assets created by any other user. A server copy of each file means that a local hard disk failure doesn’t mean the loss of days or even months of work. Since the server makes backup copies of every file when it is saved to the server, any change is reversible.

Common Actions
There are only a few core actions - Import, Check Out, Check In and Get Latest.

• Importing a file is what happens when you first add a file that exists on your hard disk to Alienbrain. From that point the file exists in two places, a master server copy and a local copy on your hard disk, and both are write protected
• When you wish to make changes to a file, you must perform a Check Out - you find the file in Alienbrain and give yourself write access to it. At this stage your computer will copy the latest version from the server to your hard disk.
• When you have finished working with a file, you will perform a Check In - this copies your changes to the server, making an invisible backup of the previous version, and makes the file read-only again.
• Get Latest does exactly as you’d expect - it gets the latest version of the file from the server. On larger projects there may be several of you working a single asset, so as one person is rigging a model, another person may be editing textures. When you come to export the file, you’ll want to make sure you have all the current resources.

What do the icons mean?
Alienbrain marks all files with an icon so that you tell the status of a file at a glance. I’ve pulled together an image with the 7 most common (there are a few others), and I’ll explain what they mean.

• my_file_01.tga has a little disk icon on it, which means that it is a local copy and doesn’t exist on the server. This file needs to be imported
• my_file_02.tga is the standard icon for an imported file that no-one is currently editing.
• my_file_03.tga has a little red tick - this means that you have checked this file out for editing, but haven’t modified it
• my_file_04.tga also has a little red tick, but the entire document icon is red. In this instance you’ve checked the file out, and you’ve made changes. This is Alienbrains way of telling you that you’ve not committed these changes, and that you need to perform a Check In
• my_file_05.tga is ghosted - this is a file that exists on the server, but you don’t have a local copy of. A Get Latest will copy the file to your computer
• my_file_06.tga has a black tick, which means that some other user has checked this file out for edits. You can’t edit this file (but can view it)
• my_file_07.tga is half and half - you have a old copy of this file, someone else has edited it and checked a new version into the server.

Hopefully this brief overview will give new artist an anchor point on their first few days in a job. Although it is Alienbrain specific, the basic principles are the same in many version control systems.

Technorati Tags: alien brain, alienbrain, gafb, game industry, technical information

When the Lord of the Rings films were being made, the village of Hobbiton was built very early in the project. This was to give the area time to mature - for the grass to grow back, for the flowers to bloom, for the manufactured things to age a little.

This helped with the believability of the film, and that’s why I agree so much with a new article by Adam Bromell, Environment Artist: The Story Teller.

Why was that fire hydrant made? Will it just lay on the side of a road passed by the player or is there something else I could do with it, or suggest for it, that will tell a different story? Maybe it’s missing one of its outlet caps and is dripping from a week feed? Even though thats a small suggestion, its step forward from your standard, boring, hydrant. These little additions will help in the long run.

Don’t just build a building. Leave lights on, break some windows, smash some potted plants on the outside sidewalk, etc.

Canalside Studios a student-run commercial games development company, staffed with students from the University of Huddersfield.

They’ve just placed joint second in the Microsofts Dream/Build/Play XNA competition, which should lead to their game being published on Xbox Live.

Since work is removing MSN messenger, and I rarely speak to more that 1 or two friends on it, I’m ditching it and moving to Jabber.

http://www.jabber.org/about/overview.shtml

The nice thing about Jabber is that it’s an open system, so I can see the same contacts in iChat and Googletalk, and Googletalk works within it’s own application or the browser.

The best thing was clearing out my MSN contacts, I had hundreds of people there that I never speak to, so I pared it down to about 5 people, and linked them up via a Jabber server so that they can still see me.

At first I was afraid, I was petrified - but then I remembered that the same thing happened 5 years ago with ICQ. ICQ became so bloated and messy that it wasn’t worth using anymore.

Technorati Tags: jabber, messenger, msn