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Microsoft RAID for life. It was the best bug tracking client I have ever used. It was just a super thin layer on top of SQL and it was fast and if producers wanted to generate any stupid charts, they had to export it to excel and deal with making pretty pictures there and not in my bug tracking software. It was a glorious and simple thing. Edit: now we use stupid bloaty JIRA. HATES IT. Edit 2: vvv: Nah, you're just an artist. They never understand source control! devilmouse fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Nov 1, 2011 |
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Nov 1, 2011 19:29
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This just in, I am officially the office technophobe ape thanks to TortoiseSVN 
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Nov 1, 2011 19:30
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Aliginge posted:This just in, I am officially the office technophobe ape thanks to TortoiseSVN  Either that or, maybe, Hg/Mercurial + their big-files add-on (which basically just sneaks SVN in under Hg/Mercurial's pettycoats)
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Nov 1, 2011 19:41
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Dinurth posted:Jira for tasks and DevTrack for bugs. I despise Devtrack, but Jira is pretty great so it balances out I guess. The studio I'm about to go to uses FogBugz but I told them about Redmine which is a free but also allows plugins. We used FogBugz at the job I'm leaving and changed for Redmine, but I don't mind either. I let my current Tech Lead use PivotalTracker, but I really don't like it as whole solution.
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Nov 1, 2011 19:59
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I never really understood Tortoise. I mean, if your product is slow and clunky, surely you shouldn't be drawing attention to that with its name?
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Nov 1, 2011 20:14
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devilmouse posted:Microsoft RAID for life. It was the best bug tracking client I have ever used. It was just a super thin layer on top of SQL and it was fast and if producers wanted to generate any stupid charts, they had to export it to excel and deal with making pretty pictures there and not in my bug tracking software. I'm an artist, I understand source control. You need to make sure to check in assault_rifle46_FINAL_REAL_EXPORTFROMTHIS.max is checked into the depot in case someone needs to make edits later on.
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Nov 1, 2011 20:23
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Sigma-X posted:I'm an artist, I understand source control. You need to make sure to check in assault_rifle46_FINAL_REAL_EXPORTFROMTHIS.max is checked into the depot in case someone needs to make edits later on. EDIT: VV How are you handling the large binaries? The GIT large file extension thingy? Shalinor fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Nov 1, 2011 |
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Nov 1, 2011 20:32
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FreakyZoid posted:I never really understood Tortoise. I mean, if your product is slow and clunky, surely you shouldn't be drawing attention to that with its name? We used to use Tortoise SVN and switch to Git a year or two ago. After our artists got used to Git, which was helped with Git Extensions, they love it.
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Nov 1, 2011 20:33
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Dogbroth posted:Does anybody know ballpark figures for experience required with international job applicants? The team could be spending up to $20,000 or so to relocate you and get your visa. It could also take a couple months depending on immigration. So, from the hiring manager's perspective you need to be worth the extra money and the wait compared to domestic candidates. To even commit to an in-person interview could cost the team a couple thousand between flights, hotel, food, etc depending on location. There's no hard rule. You just have to be what the team is looking for.
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Nov 1, 2011 20:41
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Hello guys, I was referred to this thread by those friendly goons in the Creative Careers megathread, so, a lot of this is going to be copy-pasted from the original post: Basically, I want to be a character/creature concept artist for games. My specialty is figures and expressions, animals, people and clothing. I don't have a portfolio and I'm really lacking direction. I just don't know what kinds of things I need to have in a successful portfolio to get me where I need to be and I understand it will be more difficult for me because of my lack of academic qualifications. I've had a poke around Conceptart.org, and if I'm honest I'm a little intimidated. It's not that I don't think I can do stuff to that kind of quality, because I have every bit of confidence that with guidance I will get there in not too ridiculous a timeframe, but I just don't know where to begin to get things really heading in a professional direction. I have bought myself issues of ImagineFX and it's helping me a lot! I'll be basically point-blank honest here, because there's no point in sugarcoating myself. I never graduated highschool, I have no professional accreditations of any kind, and everything I know is entirely self-taught. I started out doing cartooning and anime, and as a result have had to learn to draw all over again to try and put more realism into my work. I'm proficient with computers, I'm fairly well-versed in Photoshop, I've used Corel a couple of times, and I also use SAI Painter. I do work in a job that utilises my art capabilities at the moment, in a tattoo studio. I just really need some help developing my portfolio and I had a few questions. a) What would a brief that a character/creature concept artist would receive look like? b) If you know, are you able to give me one I can use for portfolio purposes? c) What kind of turnaround is expected, generally? Thanks. I don't have a lot available to showcase my skills at the moment, excluding fanart I've been doing in my spare time. As much as I like the fanart, it's not appropriate to include in a professional situation. Please don't consider this as an example I'd put in my portfolio, but if you're interested you can find the image HERE. There's a lot of things I like about it and I learned a lot from it whilst doing it, but for obvious reasons, no. Here is a dragon I am working on for the portfolio. He has no shading on him currently, I am including him to show usage of light to create mood:  Detail: HERE I am actually in Photoshop painting shading on him right now. THIS is now an abandoned project but I still think it's an interesting idea and I may re-do it. I feel I have come a long way from this one.  A pterodactyl I doodled a little while ago. Real media. THIS is a character I've been developing for the portfolio but I'm not sure if I will continue with him now because I am afraid he looks too generic. He was developed as a 'Good Guy Squad Member' for the NPC in a post-apocalyptic environment. An older sketch but one I still like even if there are issues with it: TARGET ACQUIRED a T-rex with a back-mounted lasercannon. I have a long way to go before I'm up to the level of the guys who post on conceptart.org but I'm sure I can make it there. I'm not sure if I should quit my job and take out a loan to go on one of the game art courses offered in the city in which I live. I'd love to but I think realistically I'm looking at having to do this all on my own and I'm hoping that someone will give me a shot with a good enough portfolio that really shows what I can do. -- Someone in the other thread mentioned that there are a lot of awesome things to draw that are not dinosaurs -- haha, I agree, and believe me 95% of what I draw is not dinosaurs, it's just what I have kicking around right now and it's also why I need to build up a portfolio because I have literally nothing else right now to showcase what I can do. Thanks for any and all suggestions.
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Nov 1, 2011 20:41
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uglynoodles posted:Stuff. Reposting this reply for the sake of the conversation: For any and all concept positions, though, you're going to want to become the artist equivalent of a Swiss Army knife. You want as much variation as possible and a large pool of pieces for your portfolio. You'll want to experiment a lot. The briefs you will get in house will be anywhere from a detailed paragraph about the history and personality of a character to a designer coming into your office and going "we need a witch but like if a witch and a cowboy had sex and had a baby." Variety of ideas is vital. Try to think in terms of development: take an idea (seriously, there are so many more things to draw than dinosaurs, as awesome as they are) and do 5 to 10 pages of GOOD thumbnails trying all kinds of different ideas. Then take 1 or 2 and finish them out as final pieces. Show the design process; show that you are thinking and trying and designing every step of the way, and show that you actually go through this process instead of finishing up the first idea that pops into your head. Work digitally and practice working fast. Show your designs to other people in the industry and get critiques. Register for the Polycount.com forum as this is probably the best place to get professionals to look at your stuff. You aren't going to get too much response cold-emailing industry artists, but there are a good number on PC. The more often you can take a project from idea all the way through the development process to thumbnails, design, linework, and finished painting,(and even beyond to 3D model and textured final, more on that later) the better off you'll be. Conceptart.org is a great place to give you perspective and help you gauge where your progress is compared to where you need to be. Do NOT compare your skills to the experts in any way other than to gauge progress, though. Recognize that they have been doing this for literal decades, most of them for 8-12 hours a day every. loving. day. Your casual hobbyist skill isn't going to measure up, but you'll get there. Research some good character designers (which is essentially what you want to be) and buy their books. Barry Reynolds, Frank Frazetta, Silver, etc. Start to analyze every piece of media you ingest, especially video games and especially their characters. Why is or isn't GlaDOS a well-designed character? What is it about Lara Croft that people love so much? What design language do the assassins from the Assassin's Creed games use? Analyze and learn from that stuff. Research and study everything in order to build your visual vocabulary. Start to learn costume (especially theory, ie, what does a costume say about a character and it's personality) and period fashions. Research things you're interested in. Start a reference library of cool images you find. Gather information you can use in your designs. When you start a project, begin by researching what you want to put in there. Maybe you want a Renaissance Italian fashion influence in your AD 3055 spacesuit design. Start to learn 3D. The better you get, the more versatile you'll be, but at the very least you'll start to understand the limitations that arise as a design transfers from concept to 3D, and you'll be able to design for/around those limits.
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Nov 1, 2011 21:09
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Do you want to be a Character Artist or a Concept Artist? you have to sort of pick one and go balls out for it. I don't think there's a specialism for concept art that's narrower than concept art like character concept art, as concept artists do pretty much everything concept related, environments, vehicle designs, character designs, space ships, the works. If you want to be a concept artist, get mad fuckin good with perspective, technical drawing and learn to paint traditionally as a basis for CG, don't let the CG painting basis (photoshop vs painter vs sai) lead your concepting. Get a bunch of Massive Black DVDs, join ConceptArt.org and participate in their daily challenges. If you want to be a character artist, realise that your life will be about 3D and 3D Sculpting in Zbrush/Mudbox. Join Polycount and make your start there.
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Nov 1, 2011 21:12
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Aliginge posted:If you want to be a concept artist, get mad fuckin good with perspective, technical drawing and learn to paint traditionally as a basis for CG, don't let the CG painting basis (photoshop vs painter vs sai) lead your concepting. Get a bunch of Massive Black DVDs, join ConceptArt.org and participate in their daily challenges. Or, rather... that while there are a lot of concept art positions, it is probably the single most competitive specialization in game art. Tons and tons of fine art grads burn out on fine art, start looking for places to apply, and realize that there's fun paying work to found in games and film. 3D's a step beyond that that many of those fine art grads just can't grok. If you can, it'll help tremendously. As you get to be progressively more of a technical artist, the competition drops drastically (but is still very, very heavy). Which isn't to say that traditional art skills are irrelevant (they're critical), just that augmenting them with technical knowledge will really help. EDIT: (Full disclosure, I am not an artist, this is just what I hear from my concept artist and non-concept artist friends) Shalinor fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Nov 1, 2011 |
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Nov 1, 2011 21:23
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Aliginge posted:This just in, I am officially the office technophobe ape thanks to TortoiseSVN The best advice I can give is to ignore the folder icons, they lie.
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Nov 1, 2011 21:31
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So I wouldn't be drawing so much as modelling? Drawing is really where I'm at, and where I always have been. I do play around in ZBrush and Poser at times, but I need someone who knows what's what to teach me a few things about it. I'd be happy learning to do this. I want to be a character/creature specialist then, as environments, whilst fun are my weakest point and I am working on that.
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Nov 1, 2011 21:32
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concerned mom posted:The best advice I can give is to ignore the folder icons, they lie. Also make sure you do this: http://www.paraesthesia.com/archive/2007/09/26/optimize-tortoise-svn-cache-tsvncache.exe-disk-io.aspx I haven't used Tortoise since 2008, so maybe this stuff is fixed now, but back then its constant i/o made my computer barely usable until I finally figured out what the hell it was doing.
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Nov 1, 2011 21:53
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uglynoodles posted:So I wouldn't be drawing so much as modelling? Drawing is really where I'm at, and where I always have been. It's good to see you're open to learning 3D. It would behoove all commercial artists to learn from the turn of the century 2D animation crash. There were people who were content that their 2D cell animation clean up job would never go away because 2D animation would never go away and their solid jobs disappeared in many cases literally overnight. Only the versatile survived. Even from a pure concept standpoint, many, many concept artists nowadays use 3D packages in their paintings for layout and perspective to drastically speed up their workflow.
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Nov 1, 2011 22:12
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Also if you're at a studio that's still using anything other than Perforce, Git, or Mercurial, you should band the team together and mock your build team / IT department into upgrading submission.
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Nov 1, 2011 22:27
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I'm not sure I get the point of arguing over SCM when dealing with files that don't merge well at all.
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Nov 1, 2011 22:53
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uglynoodles posted:Drawing is really where I'm at, and where I always have been. As an addition to what has already been said, consider fields other than games if you are all about drawing. I'm not saying don't try for games but realise that you could be just as well placed at an animation or movie studio as a concept artist as you would games. Drawing and the ability to make cool illustrations that communicate ideas is a hugely transferable skill. Also yeah Concept Art is the one job everyone wants and competition is monstrous, like Character Artist ironically.
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Nov 1, 2011 22:58
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I know it is a highly competitive field and sometimes that does feel really intimidating. I suppose all I can say is that competitive though it may be, she who doesn't try doesn't do. I'll never stop drawing and getting better, so hopefully once I get there I can stay ahead of the curve! For the most part I'm not afraid of high competition; I beat out a lot of people to get into a tattooing apprenticeship, so I know that I 'have what it takes' within me to do it, it's just a matter of learning what it is and learning to do that right!  I'd be open to doing things for animation and films as well, but aside from art, games is one of my passions and I figured that's what I would eventually be able to offer the most to. Being able to model would be really useful and I can certainly see how that would be of benefit to me and make me more 'marketable.' I'll admit I hadn't really considered it before, but hey that's why I'm here -- Because I don't know poo poo, and you do.
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Nov 1, 2011 23:11
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OneEightHundred posted:I'm not sure I get the point of arguing over SCM when dealing with files that don't merge well at all. I don't know if there is arguing. Regardless, for things like large binary files, a large environment for example, what would you propose for version control?
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Nov 2, 2011 00:28
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Mega Shark posted:I don't know if there is arguing. Regardless, for things like large binary files, a large environment for example, what would you propose for version control? P4 will just handle it and keep on chugging. You'll have to toss history after a certain point potentially, but we kept all of DDO and LOTRO in P4 and it didn't much mind. I can't speak to Git, but Mercurial will be fine if you use either the BigFiles extension or use a sub-repo for the art assets and use a bunch of friendly settings.
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Nov 2, 2011 00:31
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EDIT: Bleh, you know, screw BigFiles. After checking out the readme, I'd rather just junction across a DropBox directory and version binaries that way. Easier on the artists, and it "just works." Junction is really cool for that, by the way. Nicely sidesteps the usual problem of dropbox requiring all files to be in one directory. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Nov 2, 2011 |
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Nov 2, 2011 00:36
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At my studio we're expected to do some 2D/paintovers/concepts as Character Artists. So really even if you want to be a character artist you should at least try to have some good 2D skills. It will also help your texturing a fuckload (if you also have to texture/shade your characters). Our concept artists just grind out 2D stuff all day. None of them use 3D to help them along the way. Outside of Environments I don't see 3d concepting becoming mainstream, watching these guys "ideation" stuff in 2D is mindblowingly fast.
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Nov 2, 2011 01:01
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HEY! If you are a VFX artist (a.k.a. you can make Hit Sparks and Explosions and magic spells and fire and smoke and poo poo) you should really apply at Obsidian. http://www.obsidian.net/jobs/animation/jobs-vfxartist-20110908.html Being a good VFX artist at an RPG studio is pretty much guaranteed employment for life, plus you get to make all the MAGICK SPELLS.
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Nov 2, 2011 01:47
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uglynoodles posted:For the most part I'm not afraid of high competition; I beat out a lot of people to get into a tattooing apprenticeship, so I know that I 'have what it takes' within me to do it, it's just a matter of learning what it is and learning to do that right! It's great that you have a good attitude and my personal opinion is that the failures are the ones that always teach the most. However conceptart is one of the hardest things to get into. Tattooing doesn't exactly compare. What everyone's posted is really good. Here's some examples of concept art competition: http://mcnallyism.blogspot.com/ http://joshuathejames.blogspot.com/ Here's a guy that just recently graduated college: http://www.tomzhao.com/ Like it's loving insane. If that didn't scare you off, I'd hang around conceptart.org if you want to go balls out since a good chunk of those guys post there. Gnomon is also a great resource and they have workshop classes that are amazing. Character Artist, Enivironmental Artists, Shader Artists, etc are a bit easier to get into as the compeition isn't as tight. It's not like they're easier or anything but they require both technical and artistic talents. There's always animation but there's like 5 million animators looking for work right now thanks to all those schools just churning them out. djkillingspree posted:Being a good VFX artist at ANYPLACE is pretty much guaranteed employment for life fixed Buckwheat Sings fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Nov 2, 2011 |
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Nov 2, 2011 01:54
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Buckwheat Sings posted:
Yeah, but when you're at a company making fantasy games, it's pretty nuts how much work gets piled on those guys. Poor VFX artists.
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Nov 2, 2011 02:06
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waffledoodle posted:Also make sure you do this: http://www.paraesthesia.com/archive/2007/09/26/optimize-tortoise-svn-cache-tsvncache.exe-disk-io.aspx Troubleshooting (Tortoise) SVN was one of my main responsibilities in my last job. In 1.5 if an update wanted to add a newly versioned file, but found it was blocked by an unversioned file of the same name, say if the person commiting it had copied it into another checkout for testing, SVN would skip checking out the repository version of the file. That is, of course, the intended functionality, but it would then go "Well this is clearly a waste of time" and stop updating anything. It caused enough problems I had to implement a workaround in the update process to detect such conflicts ahead of time and copy/delete (with great, great care) the file out of the way to allow the update to go unimpeded. 1.6 came out and fixed the issue about a week after I implemented that.
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Nov 2, 2011 02:33
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djkillingspree posted:Being a good VFX artist at an RPG studio is pretty much guaranteed employment for life, plus you get to make all the MAGICK SPELLS. 
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Nov 2, 2011 02:53
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Aliginge posted:Stuff to Uglynoodles Don't forget http://www.youtube.com/FZDSchool FZ is very good at explaining what is going on, and it's very inspiring to look at when he takes what I'd consider good work by some student, and makes it even better.
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Nov 2, 2011 03:13
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Sometimes I hate SVN, especially on our 60GB+ repos, when artists commit 1GB of art and then something gets corrupted, usually locally and on the repo. We had a training repo that went up to 250GB or something, with dozens of externals. We finally had to step it, put it in read-only and tell the artists/devs to split it.
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Nov 2, 2011 03:49
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ceebee posted:At my studio we're expected to do some 2D/paintovers/concepts as Character Artists. So really even if you want to be a character artist you should at least try to have some good 2D skills. It will also help your texturing a fuckload (if you also have to texture/shade your characters). It's getting pretty big if you look industry-wide, and especially if you expand to look at film and tv as well. The fact is, not a whole lot of game studios have a whole lot of dedicated concept teams, and if they do, it's just a handful of people from what I've seen. A lot of the 3D artists end up doing their own concept. Edit: I'm gonna make it a point to pretty up this thread a bit more. Here, have the result of my Halloween night this year: 
https://instagram.com/mutatedjellyfish/ mutata fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Nov 2, 2011 |
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Nov 2, 2011 04:52
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Shalinor posted:EDIT: Bleh, you know, screw BigFiles. After checking out the readme, I'd rather just junction across a DropBox directory and version binaries that way. Easier on the artists, and it "just works."
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Nov 2, 2011 06:58
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Mega Shark posted:I don't know if there is arguing. Regardless, for things like large binary files, a large environment for example, what would you propose for version control?
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Nov 2, 2011 07:30
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I used SVN and now I use Git for code, but only for code and I can't imagine why anybody would try to use source control for art. Artists don't like having to commit/checkout/update. You'd be better off with a network drive in my opinion. Speaking of which, while I was doing Digitanks, I kept all of the art on a Dropbox shared folder and that did a great job of syncing me and the two artists involved. May not scale well to bigger teams, but it sure as hell is easy to use, which artists like.
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Nov 2, 2011 08:42
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^^^ "Not liking" something isn't a legitimate reason to not do something. It's not hard to learn to hit Add, then Update/Commit before/after working on something.Aliginge posted:Yes please, Game Artist/Animator/UI guy for Mobile Games at DNA Dynamics.
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Nov 2, 2011 10:11
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Jimbot posted:What are some good standard questions to ask for an entry-level QA position? I thought I asked some pretty decent ones about the design process, how it effects QA and how that company organized their testers and distributed the workload - you know, things pertaining to the position I was gunning for. Don't take this the wrong way but there's probably something you aren't telling us or they aren't telling you. Either way this article may prove useful for you, speaking as someone who's been turned down for QA before. http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/814/acing_the_test_interview_the_.php
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Nov 2, 2011 10:42
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Vino posted:I used SVN and now I use Git for code, but only for code and I can't imagine why anybody would try to use source control for art. Artists don't like having to commit/checkout/update. You'd be better off with a network drive in my opinion. Speaking of which, while I was doing Digitanks, I kept all of the art on a Dropbox shared folder and that did a great job of syncing me and the two artists involved. May not scale well to bigger teams, but it sure as hell is easy to use, which artists like. Just because artists don't like it, doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. The purpose of version control is so that you can revert. If you only overwrite the file on a shared drive, you're saving your latest but not able to revert. If you create a new name for the file every time, it could work but you had better be good about making a standard naming convention. On a team of 50-100 people, relying on naming files in a shared drive is not a good idea.
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Nov 2, 2011 12:16
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Shalinor posted:EDIT: Bleh, you know, screw BigFiles. After checking out the readme, I'd rather just junction across a DropBox directory and version binaries that way. Easier on the artists, and it "just works." Well well, look what was released last week! http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/LargefilesExtension
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Nov 2, 2011 12:32
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