LIVE with Baj Singh (Lead Character Artist, The Creative Assembly)

all elements of this recording takes a second to get into the livestream and there we go let's go live and then let's make sure that this is broadcasting into our group so for those of you who are watching this over in artist awake in the guild get a little like note pop a little heart or like or whatever those things are and that way I know that you are there and that you can hear and for those of you guys who were here with me live just give me a shout out in comments can you hear me okay is everything good and can you see magis screen okay Andrew Mathew seen his art station yes exactly Wow as my friend so nice to meet you so we have never talked before right I mean besides email no yeah yeah cool so this is the first time I'm getting to meet you and I've seen your work and been a fan of this and then then I encounter during atomy and I was like teach please and you said I'm still a student more comfortable and then maybe in the future I'll consider it I get it I get it totally so tell me what for those who don't know you what do you do okay so I am the lead character artist over at crevice em bleed on the toads of Warhammer franchise great and what does creative assembly do so we predominately to do historical games we've always been known for the Total War franchise but we also do like thee well we did the alien isolation game as well and then recently Halo Wars - yeah but our main kind of flagship franchises are the historical total war games and more recently we've started looking at the fantasy side with the Warhammer projects alright and are you guys hiring haha we're always hiring I think we're looking for a couple of artists over on the console team so yeah if you want to go to the website you can check that out great now you think you ready what do you look for when from people that you're hiring and I mean specifically if you have any environment in there because you know I mean HR and I'm sure there's a million people that are involved in that and I'm not asking you to speak for the company I just mean like from your experience you know what what helps what what's a good thing for somebody to do or be interested in work I think I got a love I think I get up portfolio that's where it's just sculpting work only which is only 50% the job yeah like I need to see you do your scopes and I need to see your low-poly work your game work and your texture work yes that that is kind of a know starting that off it's like if you're going to apply for a character job you need to show that you can do the whole process because we expect you to do the whole process here yeah desert since that it's important for you to be more than a digital sculptor you got to be a character artist that's the way I like to explain it does that resonate with you yeah I mean at the end of the day if you could only do 50% of the job yeah then I can't hire you because we need someone to go from start to finish and take on that whole process because all of our character artists will start off with you know a basic concept well a good concept yeah and then work through all the way to the final stage of the character totally and what else does somebody need because I know the next question that everybody or the next thing people assume is you know I got to know everything about Anatomy so what else do they really need um it's it's not about like perfection in Anatomy I don't think that anyone ever truly reaches perfection I think obviously good Anatomy for a characterized understanding in at me and showing a willingness to learn more and take on more but for me it's more interesting work but you see a lot of repeat work you see a lot of repeat fantasy work and it is it can be very say me and when you're looking at two or three portfolios and the work looks the same I want to see something that really stands out that's great that's a great point I love that interesting work because you know right like we see this even with the environment us and the props it's hard to create interesting props now because you know everybody's out there modeling from the same reference to some extent exactly it's it's showing that you can tell me if you could do your own kind of concept work that's amazing that's great but if you work from somebody else's it's no put an interesting spin on it or make it look it's completely different to what you know something I haven't seen before yeah obviously a polished result yeah you know it still needs to be good but you're gonna stand out against somebody who makes you know that the perfect polished historical piece you as an artist will still stand out to me and I'll be inclined to want to bring you in for an interview even for a chat to see you know why your mindset is behind those pieces that's great so what how'd you get started in this industry so I worked I started almost ten years ago I worked for a company called Jagat Singh Cambridge they make runescape hmm I worked there for five years doing super low poly art it was the workflow there is a fairly different compared to what you might might find elsewhere but it was it was super cool because you could get a character done in a day or two versus the you know four or five weeks you might spend working on a character when you've got to deal with sculpting and texturing and Ubese and all of that okay all right and what about a jitter yes so I ironically I did a degree in software engineering not in R so I did a programming kind of degree okay then decided after I finished University that I wasn't particularly keen on programming yeah and so a couple of friends showed me some art Softworks like cognate with a copy of max just to check out and I would fell in love with it it was just it was more creative from my point of view and less kind of still technical but it's an extent it was more free-flowing and I realized after that kind of what you do art more mm-hm that's interesting so you took a pay cut huh Wow I didn't start a job doing software engineering as soon as I finished University I I thought yeah this isn't for me so I just took a change in direction yeah so I just well I just worked in office for two years and then just worked on developing myself as an artist until I was good enough to work in a company that's great did you do a lot of self she teamed you take online classes mentorship it was all it was all pretty much self-taught but I'll be yeah I mean this was ten years ago so there was a love I think it was one of the online tutorials because the Joan of Arc one that was popping around many many years ago and that was the first when I started with that's great or and then just taught yourself and worked on things what yeah pretty much so aside from interesting artwork what is one of the one of the other things that you look for in people's work if there's like one other feature that's important so interesting work another take so that you know there's actually a brain behind this and not just you know some mindless desire to work in games uh yeah technical the technical elements so the low-poly elements so looking past the sculpt and looking at how well you do reads apology you know how will we deal with edge loops because all of that is super important and there and looking at your textures looking at the way you UV and pack you've eased all of those things definitely stand out and especially when compared to someone who has poor UV skills or poor reads poetry skills I think that there's been a bit of a trend where you sometimes see people just use in and said we measure yeah here in ZBrush quickly pull out a low poly mesh and it's like no don't do that yeah put in that effort putting the time and realize that that is half the job yeah well what are some of the triggers that tell you somebody has done that you know like how can you how can you sense it oh I just look the spiral edge loops yeah you'll see one your ski dancer ones are made just like that legend you be spiraling oh they don't pass loops in where the fingers are going to deform or where the knees are going to deform and it's just all evenly quoted all the way through and it's like yeah I can see what you've done there uh-huh I know you cool can we take a look at some of your if you don't mind I want to take a look at the professional work first and then we'll work our way back because I see you got personal you've got some concept and you got visual development but if we start at the professional tell me about if you can the create any one of these pieces just you know what what part of it you have is it a team and a little bit about just how this works for you on a daily base okay so I'll start but this is the most recent one so I'll tear this one here and these people do is beautiful man these are just awesome their brush asset for one of the two key okay unit so we really do my favorites so I want to work on this character okay ended because my computer just couldn't handle one so what I'd do is I'd start off using a combination of ZBrush 3d max I know a lot of people starts transitional pursues dead muddler in ZBrush but I kind of still like using matte as a place to start up making my [ __ ] and making my hard surface elements and then what I'd do is go z-bo virgo is breaking out up apparently yeah I'm hearing some when you move the screen it it breaks up maybe there's some okay I've tried not do much I'll just keep image for now is that okay yeah soon as you stop the audio goes fine so no you're not talking at the same time okay right I'll just leave this room then so yeah we start off using most of us start off using either 3d max or Maya might prefer max this is what I've always used and then start building base measures in Max just you know hard surface meshes and things that kind of put together using edge loops to retain edges kind of the way you see a lot of sci-fi characters and a lot of mech characters done yeah and we use that for our armor again I know some people are transitioning over to said modeler but for me Max's it's kind of odd roots dunno quite like its system of building things and then I'll take all of that into ZBrush and just kind of start detailing start finding elements that I need to sculpt if there are any I think in this character is only really the face that I sculpted or actually the body if I just scroll up you can see a the mixture of sculpted and hard surface mmm then are you sorry to interrupt sorry got hep are you saying that the bulk of this is 3d modeling and then you take it into ZBrush to create the veining and the cracks and and things like that yes specifically for a lot of the others it might be the other way around so if you've got if I show you another one for example here okay okay yeah this BB brush took one of the proxy meshes that we'd have for the animators so basically the animators need a proxy mush which they work from because they might start their own emotions before we start finishing a character off so I'll take that throw into ZBrush start detailing building it up and then again with the helmet and the art kind of armor pieces they were done a max and used to the gozi functionality to move them over but most of it was just an easy brush like extractions and then each polish and things like that to get the the planes yet they're kind of edges I usually use something like trim dynamic and H polish and then just a couple of you know not too many bushes I don't want to have like a ridiculous amount of brushes I'll use it's kind of like just go in and try and keep it simple and make it look sculpt aliy yeah yeah and is that is that a focus one of the things that's really important for me is finding the triggers that help people understand whether something is professional or amateur and so like you said earlier you know you you look to make sure it's interesting so you know there's a brain behind it then you look at the technical side because you're trying to see hey are they serious enough on the tech because if they're not serious enough on the tech you know you know you're in trouble hiring somebody like that or working with somebody like that because then you you or somebody else on the team has to do the tech exactly yeah and then so in this case you're using the word sculptural and yeah so how does that fit into your into your kind of pipeline so we still each characterize takes complete ownership over the character they work on so in this case I started from start to finish and so get into this stage the screen shot that's on it would have been about half of the job so that is the sculpting element where you're taking nine to ZBrush you're taking your hub so this elements from Max and your sculpting chips and cracks and damage into it yeah now this day is the other 50% earn so that's with the low that's when you start looking at whatever texture programs you use to kind of add all of that detail in yeah yeah all right and is this in substance hand-painted Photoshop how do you do the texturing so for the texturing we use qixels sweet because we work with a lot of contractors as well it's just the easiest solution for us okay them in any way what is it that you like about Quicksilver event list or it makes it easier for me it's it's Photoshop integration I just again a bit old-school so I like dropping into Photoshop being able to modify things very quickly yeah but our studio kind of uses both some teams use quick so other teams use substance so it's entirely dependent on the team okay and then so within the team everybody conforms or is there some variety there too we try to keep it conformed because it means that all of our source files and RAW files are in the same format right so if we need to make any changes especially if we get work from a contractor it's very easy to do okay got it in how long do you spend on a character like this I think you said four weeks this guy was about five just because of his size and the about variation yeah is it a good bit of that back and forth iterations with the with the art directors and whatnot we try and keep which one keep iterations to kind of like a minimum I mean my way of leading my team is to kind of let them get on with it till they hit a point where they feel as though they need feedback yeah the last thing I want to do is constantly be over their shoulder giving them you know you know prodding them and take turns change this or change that because at some point say I want them to learn how develop their design sense and their design skills rather than just fit under so they're part of a like a conveyor belt production line yeah and and to actually learn how to be honest just so they get bare at that job overall that makes sense and so this is a good time to point out your lead character artist yeah and what does a lead character artist do so there's like is it the senior character artist there's junior character artist now lead characters how does that fit into the pipeline of art director and on down so it's pretty much one before out right so it's one position before but basically I spend half of my time doing arts noir and then the other half kind of managing looking edge really and looking at resources dealing with contractors dealing with documentation and kind of looking at you know proxy files and raw texture files and kind of gain okay and the fundamentals together so that the team kind of used those and start building from them yeah and has your background in coding do you think that's helped you in terms of the job in terms of what we do it's by hey it's been 10 years since I touched any of this so it's all gone completely forgot it all but I think it helps as well that were I'm friends with feedly technical eyes as well so I work quite closely with her when possible it's kind of deal with things like making sure that our workflow can be sped up and making sure that it letting them write a decent tools and scripts to help speed up our workflow so it's less of a technical understanding from me and more putting my trust in people who are more technically minded guy on it you're going to speak the language a little bit yeah exactly it's like you know chat to people be open with people converse and just make sure that everyone knows what everyone else is doing and whatever you need help you know invest that time minutes and speak to be blue can provide it that's great and about how many hours a day do you kind of put in on it this job as a lead you know I know I get a general sense of things in terms of characters and I know in the game industry it's just lots and lots and there's always ramped up but as a leader you have you're responsible for management you get a lot more on your plate so I'm not so I'm not a fan of crunch I'm not a fan of tons of overtime because I like I like to go home to develop my personal skills I'd like my team to go home to develop their personal skills their personal art skills and the last thing I want to see is people burn out so when wherever I can I try and make sure that my team come in on time and leave on time and if we hit a particularly difficult point such as you know bug fixing before a big release day or something yeah then it's you know we do stay a bit longer because that sort of thing is unforeseen but when it comes to the work done you know putting your time you know trying putting 100% whilst you're in the environment then go home and have a rest or develop yourself over as an artist the last thing I want to see these people burnout because I think it's especially in the past it's just in too commonly seen in the industry and it's not good for anybody yeah it has that reputation now because of that right exactly yeah and it's something that I think most companies are a lot of companies look it's kind of counter it and we could definitely do more overall submit' I think as games jobs have been kind of accepted almost as a nine-to-five job over the years rather than you know people staying and sleeping in the office as much as well it's kind of ensuring that that acceptance is wide stream and making sure that everyone sees it as a normal everyday job which should have core hours and then you go home and you rest and recharge yeah ten years ago when I was working to pixologic you know there was burnout was very common crazy hours yeah you know even at the large companies like Electronic Arts and different places like that you know there was just reports but I've been hearing more and more from my friends like because blizzards right down the road you know it's it's pretty regular you know it's work it's serious work it's pretty regular hours yeah I think as long as people start to kind of convey that and it start you see an improvement it gets because again looking at it from a schedule point of view as well you know if you've got producers looking at your work and seeing kind of what speed you will work out if you're working too much overtime you're working on weekend you're essentially skewing that schedule and you'll say you know you're working faster than you actually are but that's you're not actually doing that you're just saying like to get things done so by ensuring that you work within those core hours you keep a consistency with everybody else that means that producers can do their job better because they have more accurate time ups for tasks that's great so how do you get yourself inspired to work on your own work after long days and management right because management's a different brain yeah so I did a lot of I did a lot of 3d at home over the years and then like in the last couple of years I decided no kind of kind of whites to transition over to 2d spend a bit more time doing in 2d because again I did a lot of 3d at work yeah and I thought well I kind of wouldn't mind trying to better my anatomy skills and you know drawing cloths and just look in a color theory and I think it was one of the core reasons I kind of went into characters because it it wasn't necessarily the 3d art side it was taking an idea in my head and bringing it to life in whatever form possible and 2d I think helps me you know helps me do that faster so I just give myself a new goal so my goal now is to become really good at 2d you know wherever I can fit it in so when I come home I usually either switch the computer on and do more work or I'll get a sketch pad and rossmann at me and just keep myself motivated to keep going because it's it's something that I want to invest time in because it's something I enjoy and want to see the improvement in and I think it's something that you know as a nice you kind of want to feel proud as well yeah and I don't think is ever a stopping point there's always something new to learn yeah that's great anyway Jack yeah yeah go for it I mean your focus might change you might change you know paths you might decide to go from 2d to 3d 3d to technical art but I think there's always something that as artists as people within the industry we're here because we're inspired to learn and it's not just about playing games oh yeah we'll work on games it's about learning new techniques especially in the field of our so always pushing itself above and beyond I think is very important yeah there's a great quote by um Steven Pressfield he says that a warrior and artists play the same game of necessity and you know it's really important for us as artists it's like it's not it's not just about having fun it's like a big part of what we do in my opinion is is that struggle to get better and that struggle to just learn and do it's like if you're not doing that boredom sets in quick yes I'm very restless I fit I try and play video games every now and then I have to force myself to fit in time to play games otherwise I just won't do it mm-hmm but I can get to a point where I'm watching something on the TV or playing a game especially over the Christmas break when I'm not at home I go to somebody else's house and I'm just like I'm bored now I need to be drawing I need to be doing some sculpting I need to be doing anything next work-related because my brain just I can't sit still yeah yeah totally all right so you switch your focus I love that you go into 2d because you're in 3d and you said also tech art and things of that nature but what kind of standards do you hold yourself to like how do you keep that game a like a productive game instead of it just being a game where it's like I'm not good enough at drawing yet you know I need to get better how do you deal with some of those inner voices and conflicts um I think personally I think the important thing and usually that voice kind of comes when you start comparing yourself to other artists like if you like Facebook or Twitter and you've got you follow their eyes and you see their work and you're you know almost immediately think oh god what they're better than me yeah but I change your mindset to more of a inspirational one as opposed to as instead of a competing one it's like this is why I aspire to be and I'll get there and I think that like when you hear people say you know you competing against other people I think your main competition is you and if you keep bettering yourself over and over you'll get to a point where not only we get really good but because you're competing against your own style and you're learning from other people you're develop a style of your own that really stands out yeah you still with us yep sorry could you hear me oh good yeah doing sound so that makes sense to me I remember something Richard McDonald the sculptor was saying about how when he was really trying to get himself better he kept his last five sculptures like in a row somewhere where he could see them chronologically so that he could see visibly the progress that he was making or not making yeah so that he would know you know this is what I need to do to grow and then you know because really the competition is you yeah I mean you you're only competing against yourself if you start competing against other people you'll always you know you never be the best in the world there's always going to be somebody better than you that you can be better than what you were a week ago and you can keep improving on that and even if you might sit you know you see weeks where your improvement has kind of stared off a bit you're there's still chance to keep going and look at different ways of improving and you have different techniques and even you know take a bit of downtime and then come back to it yeah yeah that makes sense all right so move your mindset from comparative try to be inspirational or aspirational you know like that's something that would really work for me but that's hard to do when you're a beginner and you're looking at you know how do I get a job how do I make this happen like you're secure you have your job you get your paycheck but in the beginning when you were starting you know how I think yeah in the beginning I was more confident and then I was later on in the beginning yeah because you're playing with new tools you know playing with new techniques yeah and you are I think at the beginning you're kind of at the peak of excitement you you you know when you pick up a copy of max so the first time or soft you know said brush and you start playing with it and learning right you know you're you're learning and exponentially faster then you might be later on so you're taking all this knowledge and it's it's very exciting it's like oh I've learnt this today and that today and this today whereas I suppose once you have a bit more experience you get more critical of yourself because you start to develop that artist I yeah and that criticism helps but at the same time I think you're kind of ups and downs as an artist a kind of like [ __ ] right in my experience anyway they've looked to a lot more kind of in the middle later on in your career as opposed to earlier on when you really start to see those gains yeah I think early on these kind of you know if you look at a graph there's been a couple of these that have been gone around you kind of see the most improvement and then it kind of tells off a bit and that can be the part where you're kind of like oh oh am I really good or am i you know is the impostor syndrome kicking in and I said no I am good what am I talking about I got here because I'm not good yeah but starting off I find especially doing something new it is intimidating it's very exciting but the only way it can really go is up so I think it's just constantly be inspired by people around you and just keep focusing and putting the time in and I guess as a beginner I know I was quite guilty of this you can you know getting feedback from people and you can sometimes look at it defensively and once you change your mindset to know they're just trying to help you know take it quite as much feedback as you can learn over time how to you know distinguish between feedback that's objective and feedback that's subjective and you know you'll learn not just skills as an artist but also skills you know training your eye and learning how to deal with other people as well okay that makes sense to me and that might lead us right to this next topic of looking at your concepts in your sketches because this is one of the ways in which you kind of train yourself working on this 2d keep yourself moving and I guess so as you're growing you know you're actually seeing more and so it's easier for you to compare more because you can see where your gaps are better now right yeah if you give me two seconds I'm going to load up a Photoshop file I see what you mean about learning to draw drapery now yeah I'm trying to find different ways of doing it just trying to find a where there's one here somewhere yeah you can see where I started with this Viktor mm-hmm you can see I would do it again and again and again taking on feedback taking on bits of criticism from different people and developing it into the one furthest to the right and I think that's kind of helped me into deer's is doing something posting it online gain feedback changing the proportions changing the way it's built in the way it works its game or feedback reiterating on the design again and again and then and keeping them just lined up next to each other you can see we've gone from a to kind of you know a 2d in this case mm-hmm yeah good that that's kind of my way of lured what trying to learn and the 2d element rather than I don't want to just post a piece of work and then just never look at it again cuz I don't feel as I'm learning anything from it yeah I feel as though did it this way I can see that progression that's great actually something like that would just happen to me the other day with my daughter because she the teacher told her she's not reading fast enough and she's reading it like 30 words a minute they want her at 60 words a minute or and more accuracy so we were like oh crap and and then I realized that the way we trained her is we just sit her down with the book and she just does her own thing right and she reads and they don't throw the book away and and that's the end of the deal she just you know it's a one-off and we go so I sat with her last night and I timed her per page you know go through read it and then she she doubled her speed right away because she was focused on this as a test and she just grinded on and she got you know three times faster by the end of the night on that and it was just impressive and I started to think about like how we as as artists we tend to do this too we just kind of were on our own and so we do something and then next day we do something and then a month goes by and we're like I'm not growing but I'm doing yeah I think yeah you don't necessarily see the growth because you're working you could potentially be working on radically different pieces mm-hmm I guess especially 2d if your style changes slightly as well you know sorry at some point it's like what you know how do you differentiate between style and improvement so I think taking the same character and just doing it again almost like exercise you know you spend every Wednesday could be leg day and you do those same exercises just to build up that muscle it's a similar kind of thing on here in this case it's it's learning through rinsing repeating and iteration yeah that makes sense but not just repeating like you're up in the ante you know each time exactly yeah you know you're exactly a team amount you want to up the ante and get more in exactly just taking on feedback I think that's that's definitely important it's one of the biggest driving factors because it at some point you're you know you're are gonna get tired and you'll stop seeing where the floors are and where the issues what things can be changed you know having somebody else is critical I look at it and then taking that feedback on board and reiterated nothing's great that's great and then is there like let's say for example you're working and you're going through this is there some trigger that tells you it's time to stop or do you believe it's important to kind of push through the pain and keep drawing when you're feeling like it's not going well how do you manage that I think at some point you do need a break because at some point you're gonna keep going and you're gonna slow down because you're not motivated yeah or you know your brain somewhere else and I think at that point it's always something meditation where you take ten minutes take half an hour away or whatever time you feel you need and then come back to it with fresh eyes I think that's definitely important rather than kind of just drill away it's something and it's again this kind of ties into the whole crunch overtime thing it's you know at the end of the day go home rest come back and look at your task especially if you've got a difficult task that you might come back the next day with with fresh eyes on yeah yeah that makes sense have you ever had one of your iris like go get a cup of coffee have you see people get stressed because over the software breaks which just happens sometimes or you know they're having there's no might be struggling with something but I think all the ice on my team are quite determined and strong world anyway so they tend to plow through it but they're a good bunch so you know I've tried not to be too critical of them yeah yeah that's great is one of the most important things I learned was how in essential it is to take breaks and and I think someone is telling me there's a pompadour Oh technique I'm probably pronouncing that incorrectly but it I discovered it through a different name and it's just every 45 minutes get up yeah I think you need to do that no I just stopped your legs from going numb or watch anyway I'm standing Destin yeah sorry about that noise we just let our hot rod go on about his business sorry I I forget what time is over though it's like half past 9:00 here in the evening yeah I know it's 1:00 1:30 so lunch time okay oh nice yeah all right so what about Anatomy what got you focused on Anatomy um I think yeah well getting a characterized I started off as I should have mentioned when I started off working in industry I started off as an environment artist and then moved into characters the reason being is because whilst I enjoyed doing environments with characters I can kind of a see the progression in in kind of a small focused area rather than over a big sprawling scene mm-hmm so I decided to change my focus and move into character art which is why I kind of got here but a lot of that came down to studying Anatomy wherever I can't have fun not just studying it but finding a way to study Anatomy that works yeah knowledge in to look at some of the techniques chitin would provide all the Stan Prokopenko would provide it's not looking at those elements and bringing those in that's great and that's what I wanted you to talk about for a second is how to learn anatomy cuz I've spent a lot of time learning it and yeah one of the you know key things that I've learned is that a big part of this process is just developing strategies to help you you know and then not getting locked onto details like you know at the end of the day there's plenty of sculptors I know that sculpt you know just beautifully but if you were to ask them like where's the let's say where's the brachioradialis it does have long they're not you know it's totally unimportant to them anymore they they can see it in their mind but you know the the name is you're relevant to them you know so they're not stuck on those details so like if we were did you have to look at like one of your pieces like the face you know for example like what did you do there and what was important to you in learning the face and really Nick lock it in facial anatomy because I see a lot of notes and structure things of that nature I'll be honest with you yeah honesty is good I lost you lost you are you there you go oh can you hear me now i can yep Oh brilliant I think what I was saying was is that I still forget a lot of this yeah it's not something that you can do once twice three times and it gets stuck in it's things that you do iteratively over time and then one or two bones might stick with you and then three or four bones might stick with you and then yeah the muscles will start to stick with you and you kind of build upon it so I think when you're learning it now I think the important thing is to not think that you can just do a couple of equal show drawings and then you know everything it's it's about doing a couple and recognizing the forms faster the next time mm-hmm so again it's iterative process of I've done this head study so the next time I might still forget the names of the muscles but I'll recognize the forms faster and if I see them I'll understand it's kind of like you know if I understand where they're coming from what they do yep Michael I just muted you and Tatiana might make sure you're muted - okay there we go yeah and that's I think what's important is that you're not remembering the names because it's not about remembering the names yeah it's about looking at the fort that I think the forms are the important thing is something I've started to do in fact I'll post another one up here that I haven't put my face now I lost your audio again means not updating nope can't hear you might be because like I don't see the GoToMeeting interface here so how do we get you back this is not connected to this okay hard to say how we fix this but you could always just close out and come back in hey Alejandra thanks my friend glad you're enjoying this sorry for the tech issue there you go I see you come back in do me a favor though Bosch I yeah I hear ya I want to make this a little bit more stable so somewhere on that GoToMeeting interface there's down in the bottom right there are two arrows that cross each other yep and you'll say switch it to desktop so just switch to desktop okay yep it'll kick you out or it might kick you out or or whatever but anyways it'll it'll be a little more stable than the browser yeah I think it just asked me for the install though yeah I don't know what happened there don't if the internet went down on my side you know it can be sometimes could be temperamental no no we worry we'll get it figured out so as soon as we get you through the desktop then we'll keep going you know still in the web I see yeah did you click the two arrows oh it's installing yep Michael was asking is it we're sending in a speculative job application to Creative Assembly and in my personal opinion is this always send in you know but new you know listen Michael let's take a look Griffith and I'm going to look at your art Oh what happened no no never mind I can do it yep there you are Harry I can hear you yep I'm gonna make you a presenter now I'm trying to figure out which screen is which here we go yep just check and see if you can see my screen I can see it yep screen yes it is okay sorry sorry but but I just made myself a presenter no gonna put you back in there we go yeah we're on the Instagram okay my friends used to work is locking out the forms kind of Bridgman esque style and just actually just analyzing the forms in the silhouette so taking a photograph of an arm at one pose and then rotate it sing around you know mentally and trying to draw it from another pose using primitives and I find that's kind of helping develop my sense of 3d into 2d and so yeah it's a number technique that were kind of taking on and trying to see if that works good that's great but I do yeah do try quite a few different ones I think it's always worth experiments in as well and just seeing what clicks for you cuz you know for some people I think the kind of over the overall theme is don't just copy what you're doing don't just copy what you see because you're not really taking it ooh it's you know maybe draw it analyze it put it to one side and then try and draw it from memory you're really training that side of your brain to take in some of that you know taking some of those visual elements taking some of those silhouette changes in shape language yeah I understand you know but one of the things that's I find kind of really fascinating about this is a lot of times when people study Anatomy they lock in and you know it gets tight but if I'm looking at your concepts and the sketching that you're doing you know yeah you're studying and you're you're doing you're like exercises you know like you're over there you're lifting weights but you come in here and you're playing with you know all kinds of designs yes just so fun with it I don't want to just do an amulet I want to play with an army clothes designs play with style and just kind of find something that I click with so I'm not I'm not big render I don't particularly like going in and doing a ton of rendering but I want to take those forms and a new simplified rendering to kind of define them so people understand what they are yeah but we'll see we'll see where it takes me for me it's kind of a you know it's a very new path as well so I'm kind of excited to be on end just learn as much as I can did you have to master Anatomy before you got your job as a character artist or don't get some level again I don't think any whatever masters it I think you get to a level where you're compensated competent enough to take it to an industry setting and then you keep developing it right as you constantly train yourself up to keep learning new things especially in a work environment with other people who you know might be trained in different elements of anatomy or understand different elements we take in their knowledge and you share your knowledge and it just becomes a big knowledge where you develop yourself even further okay what is an acceptable industry level how do people how do we know that I guess it if you're looking at character or I don't see you can really put a number on it it's it's one of those where you you look up portfolio and again it depends on what level you come in out as well in the industry so if we hire an intern and they come on to say that we'll have a project they'll start off modeling weapons and armor for characters yeah and then we see them develop and we also see them develop personally because a lot of our guys and girls work at home and once they have you know show their work on Facebook or show their work to us we kind of try and level them up a little bit and get them to do more in you know more advanced work and test themselves so we had a couple of interns you know that came in a couple years ago yeah and both of them leveled up exponentially just by trusting them with more works I think we kind of had the time to do so we'll give you a horse to sculpt or we'll give you a human to skulked and then just constantly giving them feedback and you know that they hours a day of just learning an army and learning horse an army kind of helped go on it okay obviously once you apply for more senior position then we look for someone who is very competent with an army again not perfect just very competent because I think everyone kind of you know makes mistakes is there one or two or three things that really show you somebody still at the amateur level like for example with anatomy one of the things that tells me where people are is elbows yeah if they haven't sculpt the elbows and if that's all crap and they don't have the epicondyles you know I don't care how good their torso is I know what I know what's going on yeah it's a hard work I guess it's the face because for our game the focal point is the face of the characters a lot of the time you know the bodies can be hidden under armour yeah oh if they scooped a good face and they understand the way the face works and you know the subtleties then I feel as though I could help you know develop them further but if it's the one place that then you collect then everything just falls apart I just doesn't know him at work you can do on the rest of the character to take away from that I think it's it's it's kind of yeah trying to make sure that everything has a consistent look and if that's you know competent enemy then it should just all be consistently calm competent it is a tough question to answer because of the nature of our game yeah it's not just human anatomy it's horsing at me or you're gonna make a dragon or you've got to make an orc so it's a lot of very to not be that we try and challenge people on it's there's some weird creatures that come out of it you're on it yeah and that makes sense that's actually one of the things merchants Colicchio's its CD Projekt RED he teaches at the boot camp and that's one that's what he started this boot camp out with was is if you don't know the face you know you got to start here because this is the thing that's gonna inform everything else all the sculpting challenges you have are in the face yeah I kind of step away from the details and look at the form do with these illustrations is look at the actual form that you see on the surface and you know don't send me a sculpt with a ton of skin details and you know cuts and paws it's like look at the actual form and the rest is just detail after that yeah that makes me know that the detail makes no you know the details not gonna improve it all yeah so would you say muzzle of the mouth verse lips like lips are a detail at the end of the day perhaps yeah I mean good even smaller than that like looking at the you know looking at the shape of the fingers as opposed to looking at the wrinkles on the knuckles for example or the wrinkles on your finger joints it's like going into that sort of detail you you just start spamming it on it and you might make it look nice but if the rest of the finger looks incorrect it makes no difference yeah and I think that's the second time you've mentioned hands so that was the other thing that kind of that interests me because I'm always looking for like what is the one thing that students can do that if they do it somebody like you is gonna say all oh damn you know like this person is good yeah especially if you go for a job at a company that makes first-person shooters enhance is definitely important yeah but first yeah it's both the overall form and and I personally look interesting fantasy art portfolios because again is a lot of fantasy art so I'll look at people who do something different I don't need to see like under the want to see you know maybe an interesting spin on that orc but if I see potential I think it especially with a junior or an associate if I see a good potential to learn and you know you follow them on Facebook or Twitter you see them post in work at a time I'll usually want to interview them because you can see that they are start you know they're starting off on their growth and they're gonna get somewhere you know really high versus someone who is middling and kind of stays middling and doesn't really develop at that point yeah it's like someone who might be a low-level than them but is showing you know so much potential in the long run versus someone who just stays kind of like flatline in the middle it's always going to be with the most potential that's gonna you know get in there got it all right so now we're right there up at the time so I know it's it's getting late there for you so I think I like I'll open this up for questions and then I've got one question for you so let me see there's a tech question I think by yawn I'm trying to see if I can find it Kyle was saying how long it takes for you to know that's different so yawn is asking do you use turbosmooth together with edge loops to control the mesh for hot surface elements usually in max I use the smoothing groups and you can change smoothing groups on different phases and it minimizes the amount that you rely on edge loops so if you use smoothing groups on different phases and then turn on tube turbosmooth to retain smoothing groups it does help quite a lot and then you can reduce the amount of work that you need to do add in control loops to retain those really sharp edges right okay got it and how much because this is one of the questions we have to deal with in environment arts how much will let's start here with this one so mostly what I see nowadays is a high polygon or a high-res sculpt first approach and then optimization because I'm assuming you know people want to know you can go the mile before they figure out how to get you there faster right make sure you have the endurance and the skill to do something that looks awesome so but then we have this trade off and it's this trade off of what Yan is asking about you know how do we do this efficiently and with this game mentality because game is you know there's a craft to that so how important is optimizing things like that and using it in this way of like using smoothing groups how important is that in your consideration to bring somebody on and say in intern verse if they just throw a bunch of edge loops in there to control it um so for high poly stuff it's fine because because high poly assets never go into the game high poly assets are going to be baked onto a low poly asset so most of the edge loops should come on the low poly so when it comes to your high poly you've just got to follow you know certain rules to make sure that bakes down correctly for example not having your edges at you know a perfect night degree sharp angle because nothing in real life is really you know that perfectly angle everything has a kind of curve to it so when it comes to your high poly I'm not too concerned with how you build that it's entirely up to you as long as it bakes down nicely to a low poly and you get that transition that's the most important part yeah and in the low poly are you bevel een edges or do you try to do that in trim sheets or keep it as low as possible so poly count why is it depends entirely on the I set we normally set the artisan limit and then see whether they could work within it and there might be a bit of back-and-forth if they need to go above but for the most part we generally hit the nail on the head but the low poly is just the main thing is edge loops so making sure that you build your reads apology you know your low poly in such a way that it can deform properly around say the arms or the shoulders or the legs that's that's the key part for me when you're looking at edges you I mean we don't really add control loops your low poly you know need to change your smoothing group which will give you nice shading but yeah the important the most important thing when reads apology is being efficient and looking at ways that your low poly is going to deform those are the most important things for me to look at anyway okay cool and what's the polygon count you're working with four let's say not a hero character but like you know mid-level character it depends so much let's say if you look on this page and you look at the rat the fourth picture from the riot yeah I think each of those is about ten eleven thousand triangles and then the big guy on the left the golden necklace Fink's he was about forty five and triangles if you want quads like you'd see in ZBrush you just double it so twenty thousand quads right no yeah pretty much I mean in games you get to talk about triangles so yes it's you the way around yeah but but when you refer to game meshes we you normally say triangles cuz that's it when it when it goes into a game engine everything gets converted into triangles even if you model it as quads quads are just a way for rigors and Skinner's to kind of easily select edge loops so they can skin their characters very easily but for the purpose of the game yeah everything gets compared to Troy so refer to them as Troy's yes awesome all right okay there's a couple more questions let's see you Corinne is saying the female on your personal work you used several maps how do you how many maps do you expect an entry-level applicant to use on a standard human and she's talking about UV Islands she says it depends I would say on robben guessing she talking about Robin yeah I did use several I use subsurface carry and I use quite you know quite a few techniques it's entirely up to you I'm not too fussed how how many maps you use if you can use one you can use two you can use four but if you don't efficiently pack your UVs within those maps then I'll notice there you go yeah that's great that is so perfect thank you because the key thing for us is what moves the needle so who cares how many islands you got and all of that stuff just have you done it efficiently how exactly put it well exactly it's like how efficient can you be and even looking at your characters if you have a a body and head that that don't have much detail on them that you used a 4k resolution map I look at that and go where you could have done that in a 1k or 2k so that part of optimization matters so look at what you're making and learn how to make decisions based upon you know how much detail is going into a SERP yep got it and then what about posing is that something that you know you do an exceptional exceptional job at so is that something that you expect people to kind of do yes it definitely helps for personal work especially take the time to pose it if I'm posed in one of my characters I'll quickly build a skeleton in max using this bone tools and skin it up it doesn't have to be clean get it into a good pose and then I'll take that Oh Polly I said to ZBrush just move and clean it up a little bit move some of those verts around so it emulates what you'd see in game perfect alright my friend thank you so much for taking the time sharing your wisdom and all of that and so just in summary you guys have heard a lot I think there's a couple of people Danny Rosenberg and Michael Griffith are both Gryphon are both looking at you looking at applying over there so the key things and this is really I'm I wanted to say this instead of asking Raj this the key thing that I want everybody to remembers look for the language the Baz uses so he said a little bit more sculptural you know he's interested in the efficiencies look for the way that he talks how what's really important for him is making sure things are interesting but then at the same time you know make sure that you can handle you know he wants to have some sense that you can handle the technical capacity start to read between the lines when you're hearing people get interviewed read between the lines to see what's really important to them because most likely if Raj is like the other people I've met you know when you're hot you can hire an artist whose looks they are great work and it's just amazing but then you get them in-house and they're you know you see they hacked it all together then their work flows a little bit laborious they're not very efficient and that's a big drag you know on a team if you're not careful so you got to look for what what are the ways in which he's phrasing things and see if you can understand what's important to him and then that's what you do is you make sure that you're hitting all of those targets in your guyses work so last thing for you Bosch what do you recommend that people do or or or how they what they focus on if they're interested in an internship at a company like creative assembly or with an artist like yourself like what's something that really makes a difference to you outside of being interesting work and making sure they have a technical something technical about the work like maybe a rig in there or something what else helps internet presence definitely helps it's got more and more common you know as you see groups on Facebook you know you look up polycount in Twitter now having that kind of presence will get you will definitely get you noticed because even if you do amazing work if I don't see it I might not recognize realize that you're out there yeah but definitely like whatever company you're applying for try and look at what they do and find ways not necessarily to emulate it but to in your mind try and improve on it again as an intern it's good it's gonna be difficult for you to do cuz you're just starting out but having that kind of goal you know firmly set I want to work for this company so you know I'm gonna take their approach and see what I could do to make it stand out above everyone else is I think is a good mindset to go in with yeah that's great and do you like it when people have a portfolio that's like tailored for your company we know you do this project so we're gonna do an interesting take on that project because of how long it takes do character work and I can understand that you know when you're looking for a job as especially as an internship you might be applying in several places I'd say look at your portfolio and you know do three or four to standout pieces but diversify them so bipedal human piece definitely whether it's fantasy or sci-fi you know do both do one that has a lot of elements on Crofton and over that has elements of hard surface at least that way I know that you can handle both of those things even if then you know there might not context be completely relevant to what we do because I also understand it from your point of view you've got a finite amount of time to kind of do this work you might have a another job that you're working out you know working a coffee shop while you're trying to work on your portfolio and characters take a long time so don't necessarily tell though what you're doing to the company just take four pieces of work that maybe you know use current generation tech especially if you work you're on a work for a company like us or for a company that makes you know ps4 or current current gen console games and try and build something that mixes all those different techniques in so hard surface cloth hair an ami and is it an interesting why cool I remember and thank you so much for taking the time no worries thank you very much for having me if so it's great to talk to you okay guys any questions you can put them you can sue them to me and I'll get them to Bosch and then we can kind of go from there otherwise you know the drill head over to the video in the Gil tell me one thing that you've really picked up out of this so that I know you guys are acquiring more and more knowledge because as you know we do this on a weekly basis so in order for me to keep doing that you guys tell me what you're learning and what's working all right Rajesh thank you so much my friend for that thank you thanks take care guys bye bye

Channel: Ryan Kingslien - Vertex School

Views: 5,599

Rating: 4.8865247 out of 5

Keywords: Game Artist Podcast, Game, Artist, Podcast, Ryan Kingslien, Ryan, Kingslien, Baj Singh, Baj, Singh, Character, Creative Assembly, Game Artist Bootcamp, Bootcamp

Id: zpvBCNPiqtY

Length: 62min 5sec (3725 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 16 2018