There are many ways to construct a mesh, but if you want it to deform well, there are certain topologies that will give you better results.
Just go and read what Ancient-Pig has written in his Ancient-Pig’s basic deformation tutorial. He’s nailed it.
I know Adobe are bringing out an online photo editor, but in the meantime….
I’ve just been playing with Picnik - http://www.picnik.com
It allows you to edit your photos via a flash interface - crop, rotate etc. It also handles colour edit, hue shifts, saturation adjustments, redeye removal and so-on.
Where it really comes into play is its integration with other sites - Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Photobucket, Webshots etc. I was able to load an image that I had uploaded to Flickr, push the saturation on it, and save it back to Flickr in seconds.
Asked of me on Game-artists forums a few weeks ago (it seems to have gone kaput).
How long does it take to build and texture a model? 1 Week? 1 month?
Some models take a long time, some don’t. Some come together quickly, and others are a struggle to get right.
The time taken depends on the models importance in the game, and I don’t think I have ever worked on a game where you sat down, built and textured a model in a few days and had it be final. Most of the time your model will have to be altered (for artistic, animation or technial reasons), and in almost all cases you’ll need to have the assets approved, often by several people. You always revisit to adjust and polish geometry (often for deformation), texture maps, shader values, rigging, skinning.
I could build a game ready 5k model then unwrap it, texture it with diffuse, specular and normal maps, then rig its body and face in a week. If I was building it by reusing and changing a head from one model, a torso from another, legs from another I could probably construct two a week. These would be good enough to go into a game, but would still require more work - but spending a month on a model isn’t necessarily the best option. Spending 4 weeks on it would be a better use of time.
But 4 weeks and a month are the same thing, are they not?
Spending a month on one asset is quite boring. How about spending a block of 2 weeks on it, then another week a few months later adjusting it, then a few months later going back for a week of polishing? That’s a much more likely scenario - and in my opinion it’s also a more effective method that a solid 30 days non-stop.
Technorati Tags: game industry, how long does it take to build a model?
SKU - Stock Keeping Unit
I few years ago when working at another company, we got emails from management telling us how well we were doing - “And we will be releasing XXX on 4 SKUs”. I had no idea what a SKU was, I asked, and was told it was Stock Keeping Unit. Right, but what does that really mean?
It’s basically a barcode - something that makes it easy for shops to track different versions of the same product.
SKU - Games: game, per platform, per packaging.
If you were to release a game on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, that would be 2 SKUs. If you were to release it on the PC as a standard
edition and a deluxe edition, that would be 2 SKUs. It’s the same product (more or less), but just gets tracked differently.
Now, I’m also assuming that region releases get their own SKUs too, so an NTSC and a PAL release count as 2 SKUs, but I can’t confirm that. However it works, I’ll still be buying Skate next week.
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:
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.
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
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.