How To Get Your Work Noticed with Alex Senechal

hey there everybody give me a quick shout-out in chat or questions let me know if you can hear me yep I see it there you go and give us a second to get ourselves started here and get people kind of in Alexander can hear me Remy can hear me okay I'm gonna broadcast in the audio now you guys should be seeing our screens on Facebook live we're going to twitch YouTube and also to to to Facebook and and whatnot in GoToWebinar alright so guys on GoToWebinar do you hear any echo no echo Alex you want to talk for just a sec make sure there's no yeah there any echo this is sound well yes are you sharing your screen yet Ryan yes but it's it's in GoToWebinar the screens not shared okay all right now I'm gonna share now though actually sorry you're sharing your screen oh I am yep hey Sami I'm looking at you at least here's that first I'm looking at your screen yep you're moving that around that's me okay I set you over to presenter so all right give me a second guys make sure that we've got this working in all the different platforms some of these are new oh let's do this okay all right should be able to see my face if you're over on Facebook and you'll see Alex's screen so just another moment as we get this kind of sorted out okay there we go Geronimo I see you over there on Facebook Noel you see you over there on Facebook and let's check out Twitch cuz that's a brand new beast all right twitch is going a bit degraded in the video quality why that's going and let's get rid of that I have to do that again perfect alright the live screen is there live now all right so let me get rid of all of these and I'll keep that up and here we go one more second guys were just we're trying something brand new so I'm doing all of this to make sure that we're super clear and and there we go I think we got it you guys everything looks like it is in exactly where it needs to be so let's just get this moving down the road okay all right so we're recording on a couple of different devices were broadcasting all over the place and right now if you see me in the lower corner that means you're watching it live or you're watching it on social channels and you'll see up here you're gonna see the other direction I have to mirror these things you'll see alex's screen so we're going to start this conversation out with a bit of an introduction get get you guys to know who alex is what he does maybe a little bit about what this job is that he does maybe a little bit about the class that he's teaching over a game Art Institute and and then Alex really wanted to talk to you guys about it really this this way to present in your work and Alex is definitely one of the guys I just love the way he kind of lays these things down the way he presents it the way he kind of gives these really cool edgy shots to everything so this could be a great conversation to see how you can get yourself noticed cuz that's the hard thing today because there's just so many people getting into this industry and so many people are so good so how do you get yourself noticed and and help people see you know that you have what it takes this would be a great conversation and then alex is gonna break down and walk through what he did in his previous class and what you can kind of expect for his upcoming class so we don't have a ton of time because he's actually home from lunch we should get this thing going and get moving so Alex thanks so much for joining me yeah man it's nice to be here yeah all right so give me a quick rundown what what's your job what do you do right now so basically I work at 343 industries working on the Halo franchise right now I'm an environment artist and I also concept and design pretty much everything that I make there you know I've worked on halo 5 halo 5 DLC I'll just bring up some of that stuff to show you but in my free time I'm a concept designer and that's you know that's really where a lot of my passion lies yeah so it goes from making and designing assets like here for the end of the game you know I created and designed this area yeah we did out to just designing single one-off props and environments and how much design capacity do you have in job when you're giving us I know it can vary but what I'm getting at here is you're an environment artist that's the title and but do you get these designs straight up are you just are you responsible for fleshing these out so I mean it really does it really depends right like this one for example I had some sketches and there were elements of it that I kept but for the most part I designed a lot of it yeah where's the forerunner architecture I pretty much designed all that from scratch yeah I think I'm only ever you've had to use one concept since I worked there and I've designed a lot of other areas like the Guardian run that I don't have on here mm-hmm but I mean really yeah it really depends on what job you're doing it whatever but for the most part I have a lot of creative freedom you just have to stick with it style guides kind of like any you know if you're working freelance or if you're working any other job even if you get to design that you stop the design within a certain amount of range right yeah that's great so okay now what does it day look like when you get into the job let's imagine you start a new project what are kind of some of the steps what what's a day look like I mean it's kind of like depends on what what you're working on right like what stage of production you're in if you're in pre-production if you're in the middle of production if you're towards the end so you know during different stages you have you know different tasks and different responsibilities some days you'll be you know creating like new art some days you'll be fixing bugs some days you'll be just trying to figure things out and come up with ideas right you know it just it really depends what part but it's not that different from the type of things like the concept stuff where you know you at the end of the day you're gonna be starting with like a block out and working your way to a final product right mm-hmm okay so let's say you're in the middle of production yeah so if you're in the middle of production right you're gonna be showing up there's probably a framework laid out and where you laid out a framework for what you're gonna be doing during the day or during that next few weeks and you just start trying to figure out how to keep going towards that end result you know so it could be from interacting with people and trying to figure out comp creative problems that require a lot of different people to just sitting down and figuring out how something's gonna look and the design of it just very various based on the task right mm-hmm and how much of your day is actually creating the work verse maybe meetings or things like that I think it really depends on like for me specifically I usually spend a bit more time doing art it depends on how much responsibility I have on a given task right like on some tasks you may have more responsibilities so you spend a lot more time talking to people where other ones you kind of just get to finally be in your bubble you know and actually start making stuff and designing things which is it's really fun yeah but working with people can also be really enjoyable so great okay and then environment arts it's you know we have this environment artists boot camp over at GA I and in the ramped up to build this one of the things that I discovered is that there's really just these two different categories and even after we've run this now there is this massive push to hard surface and hard surface people are really that's just they're just hard surface that you're not gonna ask a hard surface guy to go out and do a tree right it's just you know buy it or something so talk to me a little bit about the different types of jobs within environment arts because it's so it's a huge umbrella it just means like hey you make you make the world well what the what the hell does that mean yeah so I mean there there's definitely different facets to it and I think that you'll find that the most valuable artists are the ones who can be a little bit more flexible and not just be focused on one specific thing but there's also something to be said for being a specialist at what you do right I think that while there are definitely you know people when they have like when they're looking to hire people they don't generally think in that those two terms right like well are they a hard surface artist or are they an organics artist and there's definitely a lot of people though that you'll find in the industry who have been in there a while or just are very good at general art rules and artistic theory things like that who can kind of bridge the gap but generally when you're trying to get in right you want you want to be one or the other and then develop the other skill later okay so give it to me again in real simple terms one or the other you want to be what or what yeah you want to be a hard surface artist or you want to be an organics uh you know more nature focused person or just you know organics such as creatures and characters or but generally an environment art you know there's those two there's organics and hard surface okay and so for for your jobs largely hard surface right yeah I mean three for three in most of the environments are hard surface anyways I imagine yeah okay so what do you guys look for in somebody who wants to be an environment or artist there what is it and this is I'm gonna ask this maybe a little differently I'm gonna drill down on this topic a little bit so I'll just ask it and then I'll ask a couple follow-up questions see if I can get it a little deeper but what do what do people look for in pro folios and in work to know if somebody's capable of this job so I think that's a really good question because I think the answer goes into a bit of what we wanted to talk about today but I think it's really important that you know if you want to be a hard surface artist for example it's important that you can take a concept and not just look at exactly what's there you know if you look at exactly what's there generally concepts are suggestions they're they're loose and unless it's like a very specific line art it's made to just imply a lot of stuff where the hard surface artists at the end of the day is going to be the one translating that concept into a full 3d environment right and so that's really important that you understand how you're going to translate that because a lot of people will just look at it and copy it one to one so knowing a little bit of design theory you know knowing how to extrapolate shape language how to extrapolate you know just based on other concepts you've seen and end up putting a piece together that takes the concept to the next level you know and I think it's also important you know the most crucial most fundamental thing I think is making sure that you know how to do good props and then making good environments right like I see a lot of people who start out and they want to get a job and they just they don't really focus on any one thing and they don't really get their fundamentals figured out right and so I think that's where a lot of people's portfolios will definitely begin to fall short right so in my experience and what I found to be most helpful is a lot of students when they first get next college or they start learning they get really excited right and they want to just go and make all these crazy things like oh man I'm gonna go make a game or I'm gonna make this and that so when you're trying to build your portfolio and if you want to get a job at 3:43 or another studio that it has you know similar similar things hard-surface focus on making good simple props and work your way up to environments right don't just go straight for one thing or the other because you need to be good at texturing you need to be good at baking you need to know how to high-poly model and then bake it to a low poly you need to know how to use heat and then when it goes to environments and when you're ready for that you've understood those principles you know knowing how to use tiling textures and you want to be able to demonstrate that with your portfolio all of these different things and that you know the fundamentals at least and can I show them in an image right yeah that's a that's a great point and for anybody who's listening is anybody ran into that problem where they're like I'm gonna be an environment artist and then you you run out there and you're like oh there's a lot of stuff in an environment yeah and I'm seeing this in some of the students in the bootcamp it's like you know they are a lot more create this beautiful environment with this big massive scene and there's gonna be all these like parts in it and then that you completing it becomes you know a Herculean task because you've got a hundred different props that have to be kind of figured out or worked and they all have to look good so you start to suffer and it's not yeah if it's not just that - it's not like it's just the work the work becomes a Herculean effort because you don't you the way I see it is you should try and step out of your comfort zone it starts small right and so when you just go straight into a huge task like that but you don't have the fundamentals to back it up you're gonna struggle right and it's going to be way than it is and it probably won't turn out well and so I think starting small is the most important because it allows you to iterate fail and experiment and learn and do a variety of things much faster that all tie into that end result of making an environment right you know if you text or ten small props before you go make one big environment you're probably going to get a lot more experience out of those that'll help you when you're ready to make that environment yeah great that's a great point all right so one last point one last question along there is there anything in somebody's work that kind of triggers you and says okay they know what they're talking about like if you were to say there's one or two things that you look at like for example do they have beveled edges you know which might indicate in there their understanding about how to hit light and how'd it work with light or maybe they're trim sheets or is there anything that on their work use you look at it you're like okay that guy is is segue into pro I think that there is definitely a lot of things but to two things that really matter to me I mean I could say design and that's very broad but if I were to be very specific I find that in a lot of times with sci-fi people don't see how sci-fi relates to the user and reality you know a lot of times there's you know what people call it generic right like something is generic and they'll do a lot of things like 45-degree angles on everything they'll just have random in sets and boxes and in shapes that aren't really believable or interesting it's just like they add to missives everywhere they don't know how to really think about sci-fi in the context of the real world right like that's something that I think you should always push away from and think and look at stuff that if you were to walk into a room right how would you actually interact with it how would the things in that room function and so when you just start saying to yourself well I just want to put this random stuff everywhere and you catch yourself doing that people who can think about it in a different context it'll show in the work right you know if people put lights where lights would be needed or they put in a missive somewhere because it has a specific function to tell the user oh this emissive is telling me the status of something or that something's on or off etc rather than I'm just gonna cover doorframes with glowing light strips because it's cool yeah or just you know oh I have polygons I'm gonna inset every polygon and push it in and call it a detail like that you need to take it a step farther than that and then um yeah and I'm just showing that you can take what's in the concept and take it to the next level right because if you can't take it to the next level then it means that you can't actually reach the level you probably will just reach the level of the concept or under it and then if you had to do say let's say someone said hey can you make a level based on this concept did you actually do that and so those are two things that I think are super important there's obviously a lot more that goes into it than that but those two things you know pushing away from making things generic and trying to figure out how they actually function in the real world yeah but applying that sci-fi flavor right yeah god it that makes a lot of sense alright let's get in and then I start talking about the meat of what we wanted to talk about today um how you present your work and then leave us a little bit of time I think at the end so this is all new to me in terms of your presentation and I'm really excited about the X like I said I you know you always have like that next level to your stuff like for example one of the guns you did in class it turned into like an ad for water if I remember right oh that's that's a little bit more deep than that but yeah yeah I thought what that's pretty awesome you know it adds this like it's like did he really do that for this you know and so I started to wonder so talk to us about like how you think about presenting your work and let's be clear here guys the idea and correct me if I'm wrong Alex the idea is kind of how to get your work note it's not because it's a big ego trip but it's how do you get your work noticed because we're really trying to get a job right yeah I mean that's a thing right like a lot of people when they think like oh you know this guy is trying to market himself or you know he wants to get attention like I think that's a really narrow way to look at it yeah you know at the end of the day how you present your work and your work gives you freedom in life I mean it's one thing to enjoy art and we all enjoy art but we also want to have a job doing it right and so I think it's really important to keep that in mind that how you present your work is so important because the people looking at it are going to they're going to be judging it through their own filter and making sure that you maximize the effectiveness of the work that you do and getting as much out of it to help you have that freedom and to help you get the jobs you want I think is super important you know why would you put all that work into an environment or two into a gun or into a mech or into something but then shortchange yourself at the end you know you already did the fun part why would you not try and take it to the next level or make it easier for yourself right so I think that's something that is really important because it's a great portfolio is a harkening strategy it is it's a way to sell yourself to stone if someone looks at your portfolio and they don't want to hire you then you need to learn how to make them want to you know it's not like they just look at it and they're gonna want to hire you right away you need to we need to show them why that's great so how do we do that well I think that there's a few different things you can lean on besides what I'm going to talk into I think there's two basic ways especially for 3d art one of them is technical skill right everybody looks at something that's detailed or complex and they say that's crazy that's a really good technical skill people are impressed by that and then they're also impressed by artistic skill right so it's really important that you think about how you can leverage these two things like when it comes to design theory which I talked a lot about in the class and I just really like talking about design theory to me is one of those ways it's a way to make the equivalent of like a pop song right like when you think about music there's music that's very specific and weird and then there's also like music that is composed well and is interesting but then there's also pop songs and things that are kind of catchy right and I think that in art it's the same way like understanding our rules and art theory is a way to kind of make things catchy or that people will generally find pleasing and then your technical skill added on to that or your style is kind of the ways that you can look at leveraging yourself right you know you should always look at how you can use those those tools but yeah so I wanted to just kind of talk about a little bit how I structure my posts yeah why and that's kind of what I wanted to talk about the most then also how I use key shot and I kind of plan out my work when I get to that end stage right it's one thing to make the work but it's another one to package it all together and show that work so that's kind of what I was hoping to talk about today let's do that in this and let's also talk about timeline so you mentioned in the conversation that you start thinking about how to post work not at the end when you're finished but as you're getting finished is that correct yes correct I think it's really important because when you when you think about like you know I've learned this through a lot of mistakes and I've learned a lot of things as you finished product projects this is where you really get to that part where you've either shortchange yourself on the work you did or you maximize the effectiveness of it at the end and I think it's really important before you start presenting that you think about your strategy to present it because when you make something right you probably put a lot of work and a lot of effort into it and you put you know you made different materials you may make me know graphs if you're doing environments for your shaders you made high poly so you made low poly so you make textured assets you design something there's a lot of different things that go into it and when someone's looking at your work the more that they understand what you did the better so that's kind of why I want to talk about this because I feel a lot of people and I've seen a lot of people even in the industry who will do some amazing amazing work and then when they go to show it to other people or put it in their portfolio it falls flat and they don't even showcase the amazing work that they did hmm all right so what's the what's the first step so also we have a question I believe we've got lots of questions but where are you seeing them go to meeting I will do questions at the end yeah yeah all right so I'm just gonna break down kind of at least this this gun that I made because I think that this is probably the best example so this gun for example I put a lot of extra work and a lot of extra time into the internals and to making it break apart into making it trying to at least attempting to make it feel believable right and so it's really important that like I could just show two shots but that doesn't actually show all the work I did right look there's so much more detail there's so much extra things and so the way that I structure my post is very important like for example when you have the main shot you want to tell someone the overall idea you want them to look at it and be like ok I get it and then the next one was intentionally I want them to see the scope of the work that I did so now they're interested to keep looking right there there it's caught their attention that I did all this extra work and then so I begin to start showing things in like a matter of importance like you think about when you make something what order of importance are the images and the camera angles communicating to the viewer right if the first image I did was some Camel one and it was open like this it's not really gonna be selling that idea too well so I believe it's super important that you kind of like I said break it down an order of hierarchy and if someone is looking at it think about it through their eyes what are they gonna want to know first they're going on the overall idea secondly you want to showcase to them in their face the amount of work that you did and then you want to just start going down lower lower in the priority of importance right and then yeah I like for example I like to break my stuff into two posts because I find a lot of times like I'll see people who will do a heart dump and I'll put everything in one post and then nobody will even see half of the work that they did so I always find it's important to do the exact same thing right like we start with this shot that shows the most important detailed area and we start breaking it down lower and lower and then we get into the more just fun stuff that doesn't necessarily sell the idea but it's enjoyable right yeah can you go back to the top one and let me take a look at that I want to understand the distinctions again so what makes this the important one as opposed to those side views where things are you know it looks like somebody's following concept art so I might think that would be more important well I mean it depends on what you want to show right so you that's something you have to ask yourself what did you put the most time into what matters the most to you that you communicate with someone right like if I were to put this image at the bottom but I spent most of my time here why would I like why would I do that why would I why would I not make a separate post to show off something that I think is important in this image so you kind of have to ask yourself what is communicating the viewer but also what work you put into it like for example an orthographic shot like this isn't really going to help someone understand the idea where a 3/4 view like this and as a close-up shows all the extra effort put into it mm-hmm and you know like a shot like this it doesn't really show any more of the idea either it's just for fun right and the orthographic one I kind of personally I just structure my post a little bit differently so I like to have like the close-ups and then I find that most people if they were to see the orthographic first I don't think that they would care as much because people are usually impressed by a clean design render right right yeah yeah that's exactly what I was thinking but at the same time is somebody starting out they you know they might be forgiven for thinking hey the job is match you know these concept orthogonal drawings that you know somebody gave you so I'll post those first but they're not sexy so is the job to be sexy is the job to you know show off skill or technical or what what's the variable there I mean I think it's it's a bit of both right like if an image like you could have the coolest idea in the world but if you don't present it in a sexy way or a cool way no one's really gonna care like I've seen so much art where you're like this is an amazing model yeah but it's not presented well it's not lit well it's not gonna catch someone's eye right and so it's kind of almost like wasted work in a degree to me yeah yeah I think it's just very important to think like what is my best shot and be very aware of like what you're communicating to the viewer you know this one if an employer looks at this at least if I were looking at it I would say you know there's a lot of detail you know I don't want to say anything that sounds kind of like fully yourself or whatever but like you know there's a lot of detail right there was a lot of modeling put in it there's complicated shapes there's shapes that are a little bit more difficult to model and so they would say okay well I get it now like there's all this extra work that was put into it's a little more complex than usual and so hopefully that would tell them like this person could model something complex right yeah in fact let if you don't mind let's let's look at that image and I want you to walk me through I know you know it might be hard to be objective but that's actually good so tell me like what are the things in here that specifically communicate you know that you've got a sense of design that you can model like if somebody was looking at this and they were trying to say how the heck can I be like Alex and show this work off alright they might just go in and and is a whole bunch of time to try to try to model you know whatever is there but what are like three things in this image that really communicate you know that you know what you're doing from your perspective I think that it's really important when you're doing hard surface and you know I think it's debatable you can have good design that isn't complex that's absolutely 100% true in every way but when you want to compress people with modeling you learn how to break the box you know if you make shapes that are harder to model and they're not just a primitive with some bevels on it or just straight out of a 3d package right yeah the more that you can break that the more you break someone's illusion of understanding how to model it you know it's just like in painting right they say you don't want to see all the brushstrokes or you don't want to know what brush someone used you don't want to know how it got to the end result when you're modeling I think it's very important to always try and break that break the box you want someone to look at this and be like I don't know how you've modeled it yes saying everything has to be like that but if you want to impress people on the technical level push your skill push your ability to model complicated things and give yourself more artistic freedom yeah that's the way to do it you know train so what in this image represents that for you I mean I think that there's a bit of things like for example this piece is all one piece there's no real clear and a lot of this stuff right yeah there are some simple things that are intentionally simple yeah but for example this piece vitamin 3d an easier explained but yeah like this piece for example is not any type of primitive shape right we have a circular piece that integrates and flows into this more triangular piece yeah and then it flows forward and you know just breaking the box in subtle ways cutting up shapes etc the more that you can explain how things communicate like for example echoing this curve here to reinforce the circular element yeah there's just little things like that help break the box and push the complexity that's great okay so in terms of that the top part of that it's really looking at house there's a cylinder kind of in the middle or you know yeah on the side and then the way in which that it's not a full cylinder that kind of flattens off on a little side but then it integrates with a more complex piece of geometry and so you're really looking to see how people manage the this complexity which is going to absolutely be part of the job you know it's not just cylinders Bullingdon together but you know yeah yeah that kind of complex flow absolutely I like to call it basically compound forms right nice yes taking two forms merging them together in a pleasing way and learning how to transition those forms into one another and I think that's something that a lot of 3d artists by the nature of the complexity of poly modeling struggle with you know and so the more that you push yourself out of that the more artistic freedom you'll have and the more complicated things you can do right yeah so I think it's really important to focus on compound forms in the in the area of 3d right especially yeah that's a great that and that's a great example all right so what's next so you've got the imagery you've got these breakdowns what's the next thing that's on your mind so basically I just kind of want to show how I set up my post because it's more than just also setting up your posts beforehand is more than just communicating to the viewer it's more than that it's also something for you right like when you break down and you look at the scope of your project how are you going to present that project and so you can have all of these ideas you can set up all these camera shots but you might not know how many camera shots you want what shots aren't good do I have too many of the same shot how much work is actually left on this project and it's really important as you get closer to finishing and you enter this stage of needing to present your work while it's subtle I think it's incredibly important that you try and think this out and plan it out so what I often do is I'm just gonna go through it really quick basically I have my object in here right no 13 or what program are you in just so people know so I'm in key shot right now yep and I modeled this gun in max during the last class and so I cover basically this whole topic in the class but yeah so I try and plan the stuff out actually before and max like for example I did do things like I have a missile hatches yep let's shoot out here and so isn't gonna be important when we talk about presenting it because that's an important key feature or something I made so I need to make sure I showcase that right and I want a plan that I showcase it well so let me show that here because I will hide and unhide different pieces all right for those uh for anybody if you've got questions we're gonna open this up for Q and a in a little bit but feel free to keep posting them and I'll see if I can't pass them through so for example Laureen is asking how important are wireframe breakdowns and presenting your work I think it really depends if you're going for a game art position as long as you have a good wireframe and it's not like if your wireframe for your low poly and we're talking about game art it every wireframe for your low poly is bad I would say not presented but if it looks good I would just present the model right which actually brings me to another thing I kind of wanted to mention about all of this when you like for example let's say you make a game asset right yeah you're gonna be generating three models you're going to be making a low poly and a high poly you're gonna be texturing and there's a little and there's a lot of stuff that goes into it but if you only show for example the low-poly and you only show the Bakke then you're actually leaving out a potential extra piece that you could have to show it off like let's say you make the car and you only show the low-poly but if you did a really cool high poly render you'd be getting basically free free mileage free images free extra stuff out of the work that you're doing and so it's very important not to to squander all of that effort you put into it and to try and maximize the impact of your your model when it comes to wireframes I think it's very important if it's very clean you know learn how to make clean lil paulie's and if it's really good and someone looks at it and they won't have any objections really then definitely show it it'll show technical understanding and that's really I think a lot of Studios look for but you have to make sure that you're not hurting yourself by showing a lack of technical understanding got it so if your wireframe sucks don't show it yeah okay good if the model is good then it's fine yeah and you know to just side track down your on this a little bit a lot of people and I you know we encounter a lot of students they want to be perfect at topology and they want all they would they would want to have a perfect wireframe before they might even apply for the job and how valuable do you think it is how much on-the-job learning is acceptable you know first normal you know like my my wife is a great example of how you can kind of push this because she can talk herself in any situation and she's an architect says she trained for years and her first job there like do you know I think it was Revit or something like that and she's like yeah yeah yeah yeah she goes home she doesn't know Revit though she spends all night learning Revit and if anybody's tried to learn Revit you don't learn it overnight and I pulled an all-nighter she came in the next day and she knew at least how to move the mouse around right so that's kind of the extreme case but like you know how how much does somebody need to learn and how much is you know what's acceptable to just kind of get by with while you grow because we're all growing oh yeah absolutely and I mean I'll be honest when I started my first jobs I had no idea what I was doing for a for a little bit right like it's really stressful it's hard and you have to ramp up and there's a ton of stuff that I feel like isn't taught very much and so you kind of do have to figure and learn stuff from other people once you get a job but I think it's very important that you like I said before you know how to bake you know how to make a low-poly consistently and quickly it doesn't have to be a million percent perfect but don't be wasteful you know don't be putting stuff where it doesn't matter you have to at least be proficient in it enough that if someone said to you hey can you make this prop on your first day or your first week that you could at least do it and it would look good enough and it would be technically acceptable so that's why I say get your fundamentals down when you want to apply for a job you got to know how to high-poly you don't have to be the best high poly model but don't make you know don't have a lot of pinching don't have you know super messy topology and make it easy to work with same thing with your little poly you know know how to bake consistently if you don't know how to bake consistently no one's gonna have you bake or you're gonna sit there struggling and then they'll have to they'll they'll catch on right or it'll be stressful and not not everybody expects you to be perfect all the time you know sometimes they hire people right out of college but if you want to be sure that it's not going to be a nightmare because for me personally when I started it was very stressful and I had to learn a lot and I think that if I had to go back I would have learned how to be better at a lot of those fundamentals right you know being consistently good at texturing being consistently good at making low Poly's being consistently good at making high Poly's so anyway those are the things that I think are very important and a lot of people don't really focus on as specifics great that makes a lot of sense all right I interrupted you that's all good um yeah so we're over here I just want to talk about how in the context of gun posting may not seem like a super crazy important thing it may not even seem like it's hard or that there's much substance to how you order stuff and why but while it is a subtle thing I think it's a subtle thing that you should be aware of and learn how to use to your advantage right so let's just talk about it from the very beginning when I'm making this thing I asked myself you know what are the features that I want in this gun what are the things that are important to me you know so there's different things like for example I wanted these missiles to fire so you should immediately know right this is something I need to showcase and I need to showcase it well and it's a good chance for you to make mistakes and learn from them but anyway let's talk about creating a post so basically I'm creating a post I always start with thinking about how am I going to show this and how am i I put it up so I go in a key shot and we have these cameras right and we want to go and basically start just start figuring out the best camera angles and we're gonna start blocking out our post there's two reasons to do this one is it allows us to evaluate how well we're communicating the image before we start spending time on it before we start lighting it rendering it etc and then it also allows us to visualize and see how much work we have left to do and I found that it's helped me a lot so like I say it's a subtle thing but I found that it's extremely helpful for me at least so with this one I'm just going to start out with a basic camera angle and we're just going to call this like main shot a and we're just gonna do a simple screen shot we're going to go into art Station or CG Society anywhere you really want to upload and showcase your work and we're just going to start putting these in here it's not a super exciting process but I assure you it will make your life a lot easier for anybody who's watching this on social media Twitter Facebook I'll upload the recording of this later so it'll be a higher quality stream for you or higher quality than the stream your SEC gotta find where that safe to it doesn't really matter or how you want to get the images it just matters that you start getting stuff up there and you start blocking out your post so I'm actually gonna use some of my screenshots from before I have like about a thousand screenshots in this folder so let me get them up in here really quick okay so we're just gonna start blocking our posts we have this first one uploading and basically what we're gonna do while we're working on this is be evaluating and checking out how our design is going to be sold so we want to showcase all the different parts so the first post I always do the most simple eight the main shots not the detail shots the ones that just show the broad idea so let me go and create another camera and this one we already have the front view so let's go on let's get the side or back view rear you so we go when we find an angle and you don't have to worry about lighting it nice at this point or anything like that just think about what you're showing with this thing right you know the front the back really basic stuff like that it's not anything super crazy but it's about being able to evaluate it as you work on it and then we'll go into a little bit more about like thumbnails how to catch people's eye with the things etc this is good too uploading the segment on is that the model you made in class yeah this is the model I made in class I can go I can show the whole max file in a second if you like yeah I'll post it here for you guys a link so that you can see the class that way if you have any questions you'll be able to get those answered what we're doing this so I'm gonna me alright I found what I need alright so sick so we're gonna get that rear shot in here and for some reason there we go alright so we're at the rear shot I'm just gonna copy and paste these a little bit but basically the idea is we create all of our views right and then we upload them just as screenshots I don't have to worry about final renders I don't have to worry about them looking nice we just have to know what these angles are gonna communicate to the viewer and so what I like to do is I like to preview them before I actually look at them so we've been named this one so one of the cool features and the crux of basically this is we can preview on community page and you can start to see what your post is gonna look like as we work on it right and this allows you to kind of evaluate and tell how it's gonna be in the end and when someone's looking at it you can do all those things are saying like what order am I going to present these are there too many images that are similar these are all very important questions that may seem very basic but it's really easy to to not have to do that right until to put too many duplicates or to not order them in such a way that you're really maximizing the work that you did so for this particular thing I want to be able to show both sides of the gun because it's asymmetric so that's what I'm gonna upload next I want to also be able to show the fact that there's missiles firing I want to show the front of the gun because that's where the most of the functionality is right like there's the plate that compresses the energy before it releases there's the eye which is the emitter source there's the missiles and then there's the overall design idea had behind it which was having scales and making it feel like a crocodile so those are the things that I really want to show first is just the overall idea and then you want to show things in order of hierarchy like what's most important you know yeah is asymmetry a really important kind of selling point I think it can be right I mean you if you've spent the time to model the other side of something why wouldn't you want to show that totally yeah but is it worth it to model the other side or does or is there no like what's the benefit to doing that well I mean this model for example is asymmetric because I didn't want to make it symmetric so there's a benefit to showing it if you decide to make your design asymmetric yeah I think that making things asymmetric in 3d is a good way to also break that that 3d illusion right because so easy to just hit symmetry yeah and your models done so there's definitely like tricks you can do on the topic of symmetry like for example the way that I model is most of the gun is symmetric but I model it in such a way that I can introduce asymmetry without adding a lot of extra work so I only like maybe two or three parts that are asymmetric and the rest of its symmetrical cool so I'm just gonna upload one more for this post like I said it doesn't seem like something that is too crazy but I promise you it makes things a lot easier in the end like for example I realized during this that I had an image of a top view right yeah and I also want to have an image at the back view and then I have this image so let's just take a look at this on community really quick and you'll notice that we have this image and then if we keep scrolling down may refresh that didn't show up we keep scrolling down sorry yeah so if we keep scrolling down right we have this angle that's similar and then we have this one so you kind of have to ask yourself is it important to have both of these angles you know just because you have a lot of images doesn't mean you should have them you should think about the quality of them and not trying to just fill space right like this one is an important image because it shows the front and it shows the top and the back and so in the block out stage I've already decided that this is going to be an image it's not just going to be a render it's not just going to be one angle so I think that's really important yeah so basically what I've done here and it may seem simple is I've been able to evaluate you know how if my angles are working as a holistic thing rather than just saying oh I have all these different angles and key shot and then eventually I'm just going to upload them and not really thinking about how they all communicate together and how the end result is going to look on a page right yeah so I'm able to kind of yeah routine myself and get to a better place great great all right so how much more time do we have excuse me on your schedule I can go another 15 minutes okay so why don't we let's open this up for questions on presentation I'll take a couple minutes on questions guys and and I'll be looking at all the places I'm going to look at which I'm gonna look at Facebook YouTube and then go to webinar but I'm gonna prioritize GoToWebinar because they're the guys who were here with us live and and you know that's just that's where I am most of the time so so yeah go for it before before we go to that I just want to talk about one last thing that I think is super important is thumbnails yes thumbnails may seem like a very subtle thing but it's actually the most important right like that's what gets someone to look at your image in the first place why are they gonna click your picture what's gonna attract their eyes so I find that there was a few different rules that you can basically apply to one of them is when you're creating a thumbnail I personally like to stick with the rule of thirds I like to also make sure that the image I have is exciting and high contrast and oftentimes showing something that's very readable if you have like a mech and you're zoomed all the way out and you just see like this body with some details and it's not very strong people are less likely to click on it right so I think it's really important that you pick one of your strongest images and you want to put that as the thumbnail but don't put it first because then someone will just get that instant gratification right like you want them to go searching through the images for the ones that that are interesting to them so for example on this one I have this white one that's the exposed version but I don't make it my first image for exactly that reason because someone clicked it because they want to see that but if they don't see it right away they're gonna want to look for it so making sure you catch the eye making sure you put an image that is striking and makes people want to look at the rest of your images it's super important you know follow rule thirds make sure it's readable it's the same thing on Instagram the more readable something is when you're looking at it nice and tiny the more someone's going able to understand it got it you just blinked one of the little missions we can also talk about okay let's open up for questions can you see my screen still yeah good still see it all right guys start shouting out your questions member go to webinar guys I'm prioritizing you Alena in making an environment art I make an environment art portfolio right now should I focus more on small impressive models or one big complex team I think that if you focus it depends on where your skill set is I think that's the most important thing be mindful of where you're at if you ask yourself the questions like can I bake consistently can I texture consistently and it looks industry standard can I do a little poly and I'm not struggling all the time can I do a high poly and it looks good those are the questions you should ask yourself and I feel like if you can't answer those with a yes I would focus on that first if you can be good and making very good simple props you'll be able to apply that to a large right so you don't want to if you're still starting out jump right into that kind of okay and Joseph question about image hierarchy would it be similar to a character artist compared to an environment artist so he's just wondering if what you're saying translates to character artists - I think it translates to anything really I mean you always want to look at what's the main idea what's the second most important thing you're trying to tell someone right so if you're selling a product or a character you want someone to know what that's about you want to know how it works you wanna you want them to be able to visually understand the basic idea behind it and then start showing specifics or close-ups things that are a bit more detail-oriented but not the big picture right if you want a big picture to smaller importance I think that could be okay on Facebook Xander is asking about what sites should I make my portfolio on other than my own personally and this is just me they don't even have site at the moment not they shouldn't I think art Station CG society Instagram Facebook some people love Twitter I don't even understand how Twitter works you would not do it that site is so confusing and I don't understand but I think Instagram is really great Instagram is a really great way to reach a ton of people and be a little bit more casual there's so many people at your fingertips with Instagram I think that Facebook especially is great beyond your profile you know there's the group 10,000 hours right if you post on 10,000 hours there's 80,000 people right there or 60 right there who could see your work that's insane amount of people and the same amount of people you can reach nearly instantly so my strategy is generally when I post I create my art station and CG society links and then I posted on Instagram and then I share all of that on 10,000 hours I try and make sure that I'm driving clicks to my portfolio to maximize the amount of you know viewership I'm gonna get out of it yeah so the more people like you know you never know who's gonna be there right it could be someone who's looking to hire a weapons artist or a character artist and they see it now they go we got to hire this guy right so don't don't shortchange yourself also polycount if you do game art is great you know post in the way row threads you know what are you working on threads etc with links to it to your art station so things see more yeah post everywhere okay Tatsuya is asking if I'm not into lighting and rendering yet but I want to present my sculpt how what's the best way to do it I would just say find the most pleasing way to do it you know if it's a really nice matte cap with some Photoshop editing always put that extra work into your presentation you know going into Photoshop isn't lying I think a lot of people have this kind of this kind of idea that doing post isn't it is bad so I would try and break that and I would just go into Photoshop you know maybe touch it up a bit do your best to just make it interesting right like you do not everything needs to be some fancy rendered as long as it looks good someone's gonna be happy so don't do a my a viewport render with blue wire for him ever with a Lambert shader like as long as it looks cool like this is a viewport rendering like I like to present in viewport renders because they're interesting anybody can do that so I wouldn't say that you need to know how to light to be good at presenting great okay let me see if yet to get free list okay great all right we got a couple questions in GoToWebinar um where did I lost it what is your opinion the most efficient way to grow as an artist do you prefer making quick studies or taking complex projects complete projects so I have a lot of opinions on this and I think you'll find that different people will have different opinions basically the way I see it is there's room for everything and everything has a purpose right like sometimes doing quick small projects is incredibly to get that experience to fail fast but I also feel the same time large complex projects can offer you similar benefits so for example I always like to say and I've said this on Facebook and some people like to fight about it I also like to think that both things work anyway I'm rambling if you push on quality over quantity eventually quality and quantity will happen at the same time like quality over quantity leads to quality and quantity because if you say made a shape like this and this was hard for you at one point if you do two shapes like this three shapes like this and it took you a while eventually something like this will be very easy like this this wasn't really that challenging for me to make it might have been challenging for me to design but it's because I've done a lot of other shapes that work very hard for me so take the time to get stuff right first in my opinion if it's not right and you just say oh well I gotta be fast and so you make something bad what's the point you know if you know that you can push it further do it you know obviously if you have deadlines things like that is different but if you want to like really push yourself take the time to make something as best of your ability and then at the same time write like a quick study is also just as important you know there's things like figure drawing figure drawing is explicitly a quick thing because it makes you better at making decisions fast so there's there's a place for everything I think but I would say if you're just starting out and you're making props but take the time to make the prop look good instead of just trying to be fast great okay one last question here then any common mistakes that people make beginners make kind of posting and trying to get noticed well there's a lot of very simple ones like I had said before don't just take a my a viewport render with blue wireframe and Lambert there's also people who do like weird things like they'll overlay wireframes on their renders as their main images there's people who will just leave things that are kind of unsightly very close camera mm-hmm I think it's really important to try and make sure that like I say about breaking the box and going the extra step do the same thing with your presentation right like try and just push it away like don't open key shot apply all the default materials and call it done like try and push it to the next level add that extra 10 percent look to see where you can find that extra 10 percent awesome all right cool so we got just did I can couple more minutes do you want to walk us through the class and some of the work that you did for that yeah so in the last class we uh and in fact I'm sorry let me get do you mind popping into a browser real quick and go into game Art Institute okay since we're sharing your screen and then I'll show everybody how you get to it so if you go to game arts institute scuse me you should be able to just scroll down and you'll see the next row will be live classes and there you go so you're in courses the second row it kind of went pretty fast but you can see learn the art of heart surface design if you go in there real quick Alex let's show them one more thing if you go into the middle of the page guys you'll see somewhere where it says take a free lesson right there that's gonna give you three different lessons from Alex that are excerpts from his previous class they'll really give you a sense of how the class runs so if you're interested make sure you scroll down to the bottom of the middle of the page you enter your email and your name in there and you'll be taken immediately to three pretty awesome lessons on how he breaks down for me all right so just to kind of talk about how I approach the classes and the talk also about how I approach really anything they make so what we did in last classes I really wanted to talk a lot about design for to start with you know design vocabulary design principles just artistic principles in general you know we've got balanced form talking about what form is talking about 7030 hierarchy you know avoiding even this repetition all sorts of things I mean there's a lot and I could honestly talk about it for an eternity because it's exciting to me but basically what we do in the class is we start out with something that looks like this just a really basic block out and we were finding this idea more and more until we start to reach a more complicated stage so I'll bring up a few progress images to show how we got there in each class we would just detail it up a bit more start figuring out stuff from big to small a little bit more another one and then eventually we make our first step right we start high poly modeling and in the class I know I go over the actual design I talk about every single design choice I'm making and why as I'm doing it in real time you know there's there's reasons for why you want to do certain things and so I like to explain how that works the choices that I'm making you know for example at going all three of these dark in sets and then having line work that connects them echoing these curves here at going the Gripp designs which are also poly modeled things like this that are super important and trying to guide you through it because one thing that I find super super frustrating for people trying to learn design is they're always like well what book should I read uh you know what what should I like where should I learn it and I find that it's best to learn it through critique and watching someone do it and explaining how it's used you know if you read a book they're not gonna say oh this is how it's used they might but it's still hard to grasp and it probably doesn't fit the circumstances that you're trying to apply it to right like if someone says here's how you avoid evenness in forms you might not know how that applies the hard surface so I like to talk a lot about how all of these things kind of go together and how you can apply these different artistic rules to your hard surface designs and then I also go over the high poly modeling phase right like so basically how I start everything out is I start with a low poly there's a super rough keeping things planar you know making sure I have a good foundation to work on and then from there I begin to start detailing it and going deeper and refining it and figuring out the function figuring things out until I have a really good foundation to begin mid Paul and I like to stave mid poly until the very end so that way I can make changes and add detail without wasting time or compromising anything else because the choice is already made so they're showing a little bit of the progress throughout the class are there any questions on the class yeah started asking I've got any questions let me know I'll start gathering those and I remember there was a period in which this class so walk us through in the beginning they're going to be designing their own model or their own prop or are you gonna have something for them or are they going to take from concept but where do they start so essentially I believe that kind of what you want to get out of the class you can get out of it whether its design or modeling I go over both of those in detail right I go in depth about how to model edge flow you know how to lay proper topology how to control your edges but good edge thickness is working in mid poly how to do a proper block out when it's too early to start adding bevels I also talked about design theory so if a student wants to just do from something from a concept and learn how to apply design theory to make the concept better and improve their modeling they can do that right if they want to go and make a weapon or a prop and design it and model it they can do that if they just want to do design stuff and just concept it they can do that you know we had a we had a concept artist in the last class and he just did two these sketches with some Maya block outs so it just really depends what you want to get out of it got it and Jay Swan on YouTube is asking you know these models seem quite high-res is it too high res how does this work and how does it get translated into games so the models that I'm making are not necessarily game rez you're like they are high res if this were to be game res I would bake it down yeah if seal models are is yeah you would still do the high-rise I mean there's really no difference the only difference is not to get too technical how you approach the high poly when you're making stuff for games the high poly tends to be more simplified a representative of your low Polly's final topology which is a completely different topic but essentially if you're making something your game you make a high poly like this and then you bake it down to a low poly model with the normal map okay great all right good looks like most people are getting access to that link and then we go from there and Vanessa is asking does he do the high-res in Maya or Fusion so this is all a 3ds max poly model sub D great okay and that's what's demonstrated in the class so here's the guys you see that there's this long kind of mid poly process that he goes through and it was really fascinating to watch that in the class you're gonna see this whole development cycle of how you go through you do this and it's really a fantastic education and now to both design and produce hard surface sculpts you know that aren't just your typical pieces and aren't maybe just like a chair or you know a violin but are going to be more sci-fi and also kind of show off this new Flair this next Flair and your portfolio to show that you can really you know you can really put something together you can bring some design to it and one of the testimonials one of the responses we got from Alex's class a lot of it had to do with the design side of it the design rules that Alex presented with you guys so if you want to know more about that go to the page game artist to calm you go to courses and you can pick Alex's class and you go to the middle of that page and enter your name and email there you go you'll be able to see a good bit of that for free to give you a sense of the class so I think we are about out of time right yeah okay all right so any more questions guys let me know I think Cameron's asking about ZBrush but that's all of that stuff is so new it's it's it's a totally different beast than this which is production and a level of detail that you have to reliably create so so it's all max no any more questions you guys know where to find me you can post comments to these videos on Facebook on Twitch on YouTube and I will post a higher res version of this as soon as we get this kind of wrapped up I'll just add it into there and I'll add a link in twitch Facebook and YouTube and remember head over to game Art Institute calm if you want to learn more about the course and take a free lesson and I hope you guys enjoy and I look forward to seeing you guys in the class it's starting pretty soon so get yourselves in there or n there's a bonus we're gonna add in a bonus of Alex explaining all of the key shots think you had like 5 lectures Alex on key shot so we pulled those all together in a nice little thing that we can add to people who take this new class all right all right everybody yep great thank you Alex so much for joining me yeah thank you everybody for joining I'm gonna try to figure out how to turn these things off since I'm broadcasting knows how many places all right men take care of thanks for coming out on a work day yeah of course see you guys you all right guys on GoToWebinar there we are okay thanks to Letta Rudy I'm ed make it make it happen Ahmed make it happen all right guys talk to you later and have a fantastic weekend

Channel: Ryan Kingslien - Vertex School

Views: 11,454

Rating: 4.9522672 out of 5

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Id: 7h06zSbktE8

Length: 70min 3sec (4203 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 08 2017