Where to Get Art as a Programmer?

if you've ever watched my channel before you probably know that i am not a great artist but as a game developer i need to use art all the time to build the games that i want to make so today i'm going to share with you something special i'm going to share all of the best places that i get art and how i get art what that process is like how you can do it for free and i'm gonna wrap it up with i think my best kind of secret insider trick on how you can get amazing art for really really cheap so if you need art for your games you're just kind of curious what the process is like to get art into a game when you're a programmer and you're not really artistic follow along and i guess just hit the like button and subscribe because i'll be doing a lot more of this in the future so let's get started but first this video is sponsored by cinti studios one of the leading unity and unreal 3d asset publishers that make super cool stylized art packs for game developers they're running a sale at the moment on the cinti store where you can get up to 50 percent off of their assets their asset packs are easy to use great for beginners and fun for prototypes and jams and frankly they just look amazing cinti has over 80 art packs with themes like city fantasy sci-fi and many more so no matter what theme you're going for these packs will definitely help you make your game if you want to check out their stuff and get some great deals you can do that by simply clicking the link in the description we'll also be giving away a coupon code in an email later this week so if you want their polygon prototype pack completely free i definitely recommend you go subscribe to our email list where i also share a lot of tips sales updates and much more there's of course also a link for this in the description because i primarily focus on unity development the first thing that i always recommend people check out is the unity asset store it's got tens of thousands of assets and you'll see that a lot of the places that i'll recommend later even put some of their assets onto the unity asset store it's a great way to discover new places for art new artists and to just find and well get whatever it is that you need there are tens of thousands of free assets and a lot of paid assets that are relatively cheap they also have great bundles and sales i always keep an eye on the asset store to see what's on sale that day and especially around holidays keep an eye out for what big giant discount i'm gonna get with tons of great stuff for probably 20 or 30 bucks so i think if you're a unity developer the asset store is kind of an obvious one so let's move on to something that's a little bit less obvious one of my favorite sites and that's opengameart.org this site is the first place that i go when i want some 2d art if i'm building a ui or something else i'll first check on opengameart to see what's available there maybe use it as inspiration or just drop it right into my games they also have a lot of great sound effects and music files on top of a full library of 3d things now all of this stuff on the site is free and available for you to grab and download and use right away if you're going to use it in a commercial project just go over the faq and check the license requirements you may have to put in an attribution somewhere but if you need 2d art or you need sound effects or music this is definitely the first place i would recommend you check out now on the topic of open game art and 2d art i feel like i would be doing a disservice if i didn't mention my favorite open game art author which is this kenny nl you go check out kenny.nl you can see he's got all of the same art that he has on open game art and some more stuff available for free and then there's a donation option too i'd recommend if you use all this stuff you'll love it and probably donate more than worthwhile the amount of stuff that he's giving away is kind of mind-blowing there's tons and tons of 2d and 3d art that's on his page just available for anybody to go grab and use so definitely check it out and i've got to say that i appreciate what he's done here and all of the cool stuff that he's made available to everybody so far i've talked a lot about art but what about when you have a character and you need some animation for them well you've really got two options the first is you can jump onto the unity asset store and grab some of the retargetable animation packs i do that all of the time but the second option and the one that is really my favorite is to use mixamo.com it's a site that i believe used to be independent and then was eventually bought by adobe and turned free a bunch of animations that used to cost 15 dollars a piece are now free and easy for you to slap onto any of your characters you can simply upload a character choose the animation pack that you want and download it drop it right into your game if you don't have a character that you can use well they've got a whole giant selection of them available for you you've got fantasy characters sci-fi characters and even weird silly cartoony characters just about anything that you need to put into whatever kind of game that you might want to make and again it's all available for free which still blows my mind so go check it out all you've got to do is make an adobe account one of the things i've struggled with finding art online is finding enough to actually build out a full game when you don't have a lot of artistic ability it's hard to put things together and make them look right you know when you've grabbed one thing from one set and one thing from another set and have it all kind of come together that's always been difficult for me because well again i am a terrible artist but one of the tricks that i like to use to solve that problem is use a couple of my favorite sites that have big bundles of matching themed art the first of those is the cinti store if you like low polygon stuff they've got amazing sets of low poly assets that kind of match just about any game theme that you want and they come at a pretty amazing value a lot of them give you hundreds of assets for around 50 bucks enough to build out a full game of whatever that theme is the other side i like to use for full packs of themed assets is bitjim3d.com it's a site i've been using for probably five years now and i've got almost everything on this site downloaded at some point in time they actually have an unlimited pack and i've signed up for that to just get unlimited access to all of the art on there for a monthly fee something i would definitely recommend checking out or at least go grab some of their free stuff they've got a lot of really cool things and they usually have some really cool sales too now this next one i want to share with you isn't available all the time but when it pops up it's an amazing deal and that's the humble bundle game art bundle sometimes this pops up with you know 10 or 20 different art packages in it for as low as 20 bucks i highly recommend that you keep an eye out for it or just sign up for the humble bundle newsletter and eventually you'll see an email about it and click on it it is kind of hard to resist buying a bunch of games though so watch out all right now let's get into the more advanced stuff what if the art that you want doesn't exist or you can't find the right thing or you just need a couple new assets that kind of match along with a theme well let's go over a couple of options that are available there the first one that i like to use is fiverr fiverr is a site named after five dollar bills where you can go on and find artists or creative people to do things for as low as five dollars but don't expect the art that you get to always cost five dollars in fact don't expect it to ever cost five dollars or still a two dollar service charge that's gonna be at least seven but realistically you're probably going to be paying somewhere between 15 and 50 dollars per art asset on fiverr if you find an artist that does things that you like on there you're going to want to find their probably middle range package and check out with them i always recommend though that before you hire an artist on fiverr you send them a message let them know exactly what it is that you want make sure that they're interested in doing that that they think that they can do it and just see if you can get a quote from them a lot of the time they'll just give you a direct quote for a price that they think is fair for that asset sometimes it'll be lower than the price that they have listed for like their most professional package so definitely check out fiverr it's a great place to find things you will find that sometimes you just get back a terrible piece of art or you get nothing back but most of the time you'll get back something somewhat usable and what i like to do is find two or three different artists on there and hire them all for the same job and then start rehiring the same artist again now that same trick applies to the second site that i want to recommend for this and that's upwork on upwork it's a little bit more complicated and a little bit for bigger projects if you have something that you want to make that you're not able to find on fiverr or maybe it's more than just one asset you've got a whole bunch of assets that you want to make maybe a month's worth of assets upwork is a great place for that you can find short-term contracts as small as a single art asset and that's usually what i'll do is i'll go on to upwork put in a job for building a single art asset explain exactly what i want with a couple pictures of concepts and then get bids in from artists who are interested in doing the project so the way it'll work is they'll see the job that i've got up there hey i need to go make this rocket launcher that's sci-fi themed or whatever and then they'll say hey i'm interested in doing that job i'll do it for this price here's some of my reference art so you can see what my things look like and if it looks like something that's gonna work then we'll just move forward with it through upwork and it makes it really simple to handle the entire process i don't really have to do much other than check out through upwork and make the payment they deal with all of the other stuff on the back end of actually hiring people especially hiring people that may not even be in the same country as you so if you're interested in outsourcing i highly recommend fiverr and upwork as just great places to look and find great artists it's easy to evaluate an artist's work just by looking at it a lot easier than it is for a programmer and it's easy to find people who can make you great things that you'll actually like at a reasonable price if you just put in a little bit of work there all right now i want to let you know in the secret the way that i found to get really good art or really really cheap that really matches with my other existing art so say you've bought some art on the assist or maybe you grabbed a couple characters and there's just not enough that kind of matches with that theme to go along and finish out your game or maybe one of the instances i had was we had a goblin character that was a knight and then we had another one i believe that was a wizard and we really wanted an archer and a rogue so we grabbed these two assets off the asset store and we were like hey what are we going to do to find some art that looks very similar to this and matches up with it we could probably hire somebody to kind of copy it and do something similar then the idea appeared why not reach out to the asset store artist so god okay we'll email the asset store artist say hey are you interested in making a couple more characters that match this theme and uh giving it to us to put into our character and then maybe releasing them onto the asset store shortly after because it doesn't matter too much to us if you reuse these assets somewhere else and we're already using asset store assets so is that something you'd be interested in and of course the only reason i'm sharing this is that the answer every time i've done that has been yes the artists are definitely interested in that you gotta remember that the asset store artists aren't all making a lot of money some of them are making a ton of money but a lot of them aren't all making a lot of money they've only got a couple assets out there and they're maybe like looking for something to push and motivate them to make a bunch more and if you're willing to pay them for the creation of the asset so they have no downside to making it and then making it available for sale later on through the store to continually make money it's a whole lot easier to i guess just make that purchase and make that deal with that artist they also are more inclined because you're matching along with the theme that they've already got so you're kind of it's something that they know how to do and they may have already thought about wanting to do now these will probably cost a little bit more than the assets on fiverr or upwork would but here you're going with an artist that you've already seen their stuff and getting things that match now just ask them for a quote ask them for a price on it and see what they say it could be amazingly low and you'll just kind of be blown away and want to jump on it so definitely check out other artists that are on the asset store and contact them if you like their stuff but don't do it if you're not willing to actually pay for their stuff expect these things are going to cost again more than you would pay on upwork or fiverr for the same kind of thing all right so what about when you've got the art and you're pulling it into the game and you're running into some problems maybe the characters aren't looking right they look a little bit strange there's something wrong with the texture they're not animating right when you try to pop an animation onto them they look all funny and weird what do you do then or what do i do then i've got a trick that i think everybody should follow but it's not the easiest one to do and that trick is to know an expert in just about everything art related now that might sound crazy it might sound like okay shut up like i'm just going to skip that's not useful advice right but it really is the way that i would recommend it and i want to explain how that happened right i only know experts in these different things because i happened to work with them and talk to them in the past so i've got an artist friend who is great at 2d stuff if i run into things with 2d or i want to have some feedback on concept art i send it to him and i say hey no what what's wrong with this what would make this better or what do you think of this just depending on the situation or sometimes i might ask them to just sketch something up for me like hey i need this concept could you please sketch this up for me another friend who's an amazing animator and rigger if i've got a problem with the rig on my character i will send it right over to him and he'll send me back a fixed version tell me what was wrong with it how terrible the other thing was and i'll have a good working version right away and the same goes for if i've got a problem with a 3d model i need some help you know optimizing it making it better or fixing some problem i've got a great 3d artist for and i've got two of them who i'll reach out to depending on the type of art now it's important to note that this doesn't happen instantly this happens from just constantly talking to people and from the most important part helping other people when they need help too so these artists are friends of mine who have run into code problems all the time too and whenever they do i do my best to help them out as much as i can give them the advice or the tips or even write the little bit of code that they need to fix their problems if you can return the favor for people you'll find that they're a lot more willing to just help you out when you've got a little question that's why if i run into any type of art problem i don't really worry too much because i know i've got at least a couple people that i can reach out to and have them help me or fix it or give me somebody who can fix it if they can't but most of the time the stuff that i need to get done is stuff that a friend can just knock out again you want to make sure that you only give this or request these things from people who actually know this stuff and it's easy for them imagine you're you're a c-sharp programmer and somebody comes at you with hey here's this big python script i really don't know how to do it can you figure this out and fix it for me you don't know python and you've got to go learn that that's a big giant tedious task right same goes for artists if you give them something that they're not really an expert in and it's not the thing that they specialize in and ask for help they might say yes but you're suddenly putting a big burden on them so don't do that give them the tasks that are easy for them or ask them for the favors that are easy for them so that you're not making it harder on everybody and you'll find that you get really good results and that's really what i i guess recommend and like to do when i run into those problems if that doesn't work and i can't find anything from anybody there the alternative is of course to just jump into a discord chat or a user group or something similar i like to have like a regular meetup or user group that i can attend where i could go ask questions like that i'd recommend something like that as well just start asking for help and meeting other people and of course returning the favor as well because the same thing happens in discord channels and everywhere else the people who are helpful and helping other people are much more likely to get responses and get help when they run into problems and get probably a lot of really useful help and make great connections so i highly recommend all of that and again these are a lot of really cool sites that i love to use for finding art there are a couple others that i use but this is really the primary list and what i would recommend so if you need game art check all of these out but if you have a suggestion for something that i missed some really cool game art site that has some either good deals or just really cool art or free stuff that kind of applies to everybody um drop it down below and just share with everyone i'm sure there are a lot of them out there that i don't know about and everybody else would love to know also don't forget to check out cinti studios get up to 50 off their assets by simply clicking the link in the description below also a special thanks to everybody on patreon and all my subscribers don't forget to hit that uh thumbs up button and subscribe button if you haven't already and i'll see you next time bye

Channel: Jason Weimann

Views: 30,389

Keywords: unity3d, game development, gamedev, game art, unity 2d, unity tutorial, unity art, unity3d art, unity2d art, brackeys, dani, unity3d college, unity, unity3d tutorial, gaming industry, game development for beginners, game development tutorial, programming, unity3d animation, game dev, game, unreal engine, game development unity, mixamo, synty, opengameart, bitgem 3d, asset store

Id: FMobGBZC9c0

Length: 17min 11sec (1031 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021