Personal Projects from Art Boost | Best of 2021 Part 4

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what's up everybody welcome to another episode of game dev unchained the no one game development podcasts about game development and the lifestyle thereof i am your host brandon pham and i'm back at it with a part 4 of 5 series where we kind of look back on the best of 2021 the theme of this episode are highlights of a new segment that we added last year called artboost so me being an artist in the game industry i felt it was nice to kind of dedicate a segment of the podcast to art development uh specifically talking about how game developers artists in particular uh are utilizing their techniques and uh going through their workflows without further ado the first highlight is with lisa luciva she is a great character artist that lives overseas in europe

and she was able to kind of share her work process how difficult it is to kind of get into the us working with us companies certain restraints when it comes to being overseas and um working in that fashion so without further ado this is episode 265 artboost sculpting aaa characters with lisa luciva i know people who like what they do in here and they really they like freelancing they like to work you know from home in the pajamas and to live in ukraine i know people who want to work in poland and see cd projekt red and it was their goal so we're all different you see well uh talking about goals talking about showing awesome stuff being with friends

being without friends uh i think it's a perfect segue to kind of go into today's main meet of the subject which is showing off your amazing work a lot of uh viewers out there who are very interested in okay what what does lisa have to show to us all right um if you don't mind to kind of just start with the screen share i can buy us some time as you get that set up and you can probably talk about uh what you are looking to show us today so you are a character artist by trade um has it always been your passion uh to do specifically character art and not like environment art prop or any other type of art uh okay it was my actually i started to learn maya and really wanted to be an animator it was my goal i wanted to make like animation movies or something

but after some time after i seen some really big games i get back to video games and i start to like gaming again very heavily and i start to like interest to be more and more in video game art and to be honest i always thought that environment art artists are like more interesting profession than character art because for me they were the ones who making you know the worlds the places where all the game is set but as for me i it's just it's just my thing i'm really i'm better with characters i'm better with people i'm better with faces and so on so it was like a natural choice for me to start character art and you can see on the screen it's basically

all my career in one shot because i started with the like this really painfully uh hand-painted textures or characters and i went through really stylish stages and this is my like professional work and playroom and this is my last one and we're actually planning to do this stream for a long time and when we started planning it i was thinking about showing chester and kind of talking about the small sterilized thing but this uh this model was my last one the wonder and i think it will be actually really interesting to talk about this one awesome yeah uh because it was my first like serious real realistic model after a lot of stylized stuff so i think

it will be more interesting so as you are switching or maybe powering it up online resources and self self-education is something i feel this industry needs for every artist even if they go through a traditional school so united states thankfully we have a lot of resources to go to physical schools or or accessibility but even with that with the changing tools that happens every two three years even as a professional you will have to get back into self-discipline to kind of keep up with everything what has been your most valuable resource to kind of make sure that you're on top of your game uh no pun intended

okay most valuable resource it's a good question i think youtube was my most valuable resource and art station because i was looking at other people's work and i was like really wanted to do the same so i started googling furiously how to make like clothes and marbles designer or how to make a model for printing and so on it's just countless hours of youtube that's pretty much it i think yeah but i'm pretty sure you're pretty savvy with the search terminology because youtube has a lot of good tutorials but it also has a lot more bad tutorials is there a secret sauce of uh how you determine which one's good which one's bad before investing too many uh too

many time in a tutorial [Music] any shortcuts that you see within like 10 minutes you're like all right this is a bad tutorial i'm not watching this i actually uh skip to the like last minutes and see the result and if i like the result like really like it i then i try to like skip through some parts and then i start from this like from the beginning and then i start to learn it because if you if you don't like the result then there is no way you should learn it it's the same with the instructors because always look at the work of your teacher always look at the work of your instructor because if you like what he or she is doing then he uh or she has something to like teach you that makes sense to me yeah that's great all right so i'm gonna

sit back a bit and chime in once in a while but i'll let you take it away and start showing us uh yeah okay um first of all i will show you the the video just for you to see how this model actually looks like in my environment because i would love to show you the real scene in marmoset but my computer just dying every time i try to power up the marmoset and stream so yeah let me just see here so i think i will show you the hair setup and i think i will show like the cards and how it looks like in maya then i will see about the backpack

like the process of making and maybe overview and if someone has uh and clothes from marmoset to zbrush and then if someone has any questions then i think you just go through them yeah i definitely have a lot of questions for sure well you can start to ask them because we have one more minute yeah yeah well the hair thing is something i've heard many character artists still are um disappointed that there hasn't been like a huge jump in technology to deal with hair it's still a lot of alpha cards and just sitting there and and straightening out those planar cards uh have you unless yeah yeah i mean have you heard anything on the horizon or things that you've done to kind of make that process a little simpler and fun for yourself oh no no not in the horizon i think not in near future

nothing because if it will be some kind of surprise software i'm really eager to see it because i was like placing all the cards by hand like every card in my hand and it's super time consuming and it's not for everyone let's just say because people who get bored easily oh it's a kryptonite for them i think also this project was part of the mentorship program with frank zhang he was kind of my mentor he was talking to me about all this like realistic stuff and i was asking him like right away will it be like easier to do hair will you teach me something about the hair and he said just said no no secrets it just it's just hours and hours and hours of hand placing cards and that's

all so yeah no no secrets no secret sauce unfortunately okay uh first the cards so the model looks like this in maya let me show you the whole model so it looks like this it moderately had like uh 91 000 92 000 polygons in it it's with the hair and it's relatively as i as i heard it's relatively like meat polly for triple games nowadays because sometimes like horizon zero dawn i think they have like 100 000 polygons only for the hair yeah and then the same amount for the like for the model itself

okay so get it back to the head and uh the hair consists of three layers okay the first layer is basically just really dirty place cards really big and they don't have texture right now but it's the same texture as a second layer i'll show you later so it's actually just to create the idea that underneath all the hair there is something so it shouldn't be like super fancy just for the like base layer second layer it's the hair itself it's the main hair uh they have like this card you can see here it's just five parents no more no less i saw really hard tutorials about you need to

bake and create hairy next gen and bake them and so on and so forth this mob was drawn by hand in photoshop so it was super super super easy uh let's just we created the volume of the hair like the idea of the flow where should every strand go and after that after we like ready with the results and we just add a lot of like fly away hair like little strands of hair and little something that shows that it's not like it's real realish and after that it's a transition part

transition card is basically just the part of the head with the texture in it so we saw and think that hair actually start to grow and not just placed on the head itself the same with beard hello head place cards it's like i think 4 000 cards [Music] no system at all just look at the reference and place them by hand so this is the setup uh it finally gives you the result like like this so you can see like all the little hairs and the transitions

and now i definitely appreciate the hard work because i've always heard i'm an environment artist by trade so every time i talk to character artists they're always talking about the hair and uh yeah you're pretty much just laying uh well in direct relation to what we do like grass cards all over on a stream yeah exactly yeah and those are like foliage is like one of the the pain points for environment artists no so you guys are just doing foliage on the head uh essentially yeah so uh i do have a question from the audience here about what you said earlier this is from ss1 reaper uh from our twitch chat so he or she is mentioning so you were referencing about aiming for a big studio but needing a education to definitely get into that big studio because it's so competitive

so the question is what do you suggest you do if you don't have such schools such as yourself for formal education would an online course like no one work and i guess uh any type of online respectable online education will be suffice enough for you to kind of land that interview and and job over the states i mean what has been your experience or what you've heard about that well i i actually asking this very question every guy from the industry i laid my eyes on because it's really crucial for me too and everyone said something like online courses are very good but they don't give you the permission to get a visa because you need the like proper education which is in the sphere you are

continuing to work so if you are an artist you need an art education like uh norman is not like online norman courses is not counting only like on-site uh the program normal and it it's the same for other schools but if you have all the courses and your work is really good and you're working on different projects and you know maybe some people you talk to them and they know you and you give some interviews and maybe some like architection challenges and so on you can get all one visa it's a visa for like outstanding uh i'm sorry i forgot it in english okay so you should be really really good to get this visa but it you don't need an education formal education to get it

you don't need uh the years of work to get it and you just need to get this job and have a really good portfolio and have a lot of like articles or challenges and something like this so i think it will be it will be like the road i will take eventually when i will be this good someday well i definitely want to sign off on that i just i think uh being good at your specific discipline will definitely uh trump or at least help with um with any other fallacies right just any other weaknesses uh at least in the states right in the states um uh any of the jobs that we apply for doesn't really require a like a degree

right uh i've i happen to have a bachelor's degree but i've never really been questioned about anybody asking to see the diploma so are you so the h1 visa thing does that i mean is it enough for a company like naughty dog let's say hey lisa love your work come work at naughty dog um would that be enough to get sponsored for a visa or would they have to is it a government thing where they require some formal education yes okay it's it's uh it's a purely government thing because for companies they don't need your education at all but the government they need you to uh to prove them that you are the best choice you know that no one in the united states can like be on your place that's why

you need an education it's some kind of really old policy because nowadays we have a lot of jobs that don't need formal education education but we have what we have but it's still only u.s thing i think so because in europe in some cases you can get visa without without uh like formal education uh the next episode is with gabriel egan young i'm pretty sure i'm messing that up but he's currently working at respawn as a senior character artist uh specifically i think he helped with the last star wars ip when i was talking with him he was gracious enough to kind of talk about his work process and sharing his techniques and what is great about him is he's also a teacher on the side so he was very uh it was very natural for him to kind of go through that and the

importance of uh working with leading studios such as sony santa monica infinity ward riot and so on so forth so this is episode 250 architectural concept with gabriel to get them what they want essentially oh yeah yeah that that's that's i think an exercise in and of itself i think that's i think twofold like one of them is um being able to communicate ideas verbally um as clearly as you can which that's something that i still work with all the time and try to get better at because you know you you might be in a meeting and uh these conversations come up and they deal with major decisions that will affect not just your concept art but the whole project and the more you can be adept at having that conversation in the abstract and being able to uh ping-pong ideas around as a group as

a kind of brainstorming group um the better you'll be at uh kind of both working toward a solution together and finding the best possible answer um and the other thing is that you know you kind of it's surprising that actually it's not very surprising but i feel like notes are really useful to seem kind of obvious but like taking notes a lot of little notes and things that usually are kind of forgotten even though you feel like you remember i think that's still crucial and i still use that day-to-day because if you're not paying attention to every word sometimes the right answer for a client is between the words and between the sentences and the more you kind of make those marks like put those landmarks in your memory of okay this was the struggle we were dealing with in that conversation um the better but it's it's like it's not just a broad sense of what the client needs it's also the specific

things that the client is reacting to which sometimes if you don't grab onto that you don't catch those pay attention enough write those down give that attention then you might end up solving large fuzzy problems and you might think you've found a solution you present it again and the client's like no that's still not it you know and that's usually because you might just be investigating maybe one layer of their feedback um and not understanding all the things that might help you get to that final answer that it's like yes let's build it right so yeah it's kind of a balance between those and of course the conversation part and the good the the comfortable positive communication part especially with the clients and is is important because that you know if it's just detachment if it's just a bullet point of what you what they would like to see sometimes it's not clear either because

the client doesn't always know what they want right right you might be driving a move something abstract but they actually mean something else or something very specific and being able to have not just bullet points but a kind of back and forth conversation of clarifying and developing and really open up opportunities not just for you to explore cool awesome stuff that you might think of but for them to get something that they hadn't thought of yet um which you know might come out in conversation like oh actually yeah that might be even more interesting um or you know getting an insight into their thinking that opens up way more possibilities for you as a concept artist it's like okay so you're not just looking for a blue painting you know you're looking for all these potential things that might work and so it can both open up your opportunities and also narrow your focus in a really good way

yeah i mean that kind of goes into my next question which is you know the difference between concept art and design so the iterative process the communication back and forth doesn't really allow you sometimes to go or if you even if you want to right i don't even think you want to go full rendering on an idea and spend all the extra time um just bringing a drawing to full finish so like how do you balance that when you wanna how do you bring out the key ideas on something before you run off with it and yeah like how much more of it is about your skills as an illustrator than as a concept artist right so i think this is where the stronger you know your abilities are as a 2d illustrator of creating illusion

or it will help you and it works this way you know if i finish a painting that looks somewhat finished i think the idea is decent um it's not fully rendered and refined but you know it's presentable something that you can say is more or less finished um you you need to not fall in love with that and really let go as soon as you're finished with it know that it's not necessarily the final product and that's something that you know means that you know when the player goes in there they're going to experience every angle of that design and move through that in different ways for different projects obviously but to understand that you know when you have that painting when you have that paint that you like a lot it doesn't mean that's the final one and it usually means it's it's probably still early in that process of finding that final design and that means that somebody might ask for a completely different angle a completely different type of take on it but you can borrow core pieces of the

actual architecture of the actual props and objects and you can remake these images and kind of kit-bash your own work and that way it becomes less about image making and creating a single clear illustration with all the cause uh composition super worked out and it's more about using your image as a kind of workshop and thinking of it that way you know a workshop with a bunch of pieces that you've created that you can swap out and play with with paint really quickly and and iterate and doodle on top of your painting which you know if you get too illustrative with it and too calculated with it you might end up something that's too tight for you to break right and you you need to be able to break it in order to move things and change things so you know the more you're better illustrator you are it will help you certainly but you also need to realize that you know as a concept artist you're

you're a concept designer first essentially and then an artist second in a way where first you're supposed to do the dirty work of piecing these things together and stitching them and ripping them apart and that's kind of why you have your job right because that's harder to do when you have a full finished product and it's much easier to do when you just have pixels moving around so if you can do those quick movements and those changes in those earlier stages then you know you that sets the whole team up for success um that sets the art director up for not feeling like they're you know derailing your whole illustrated masterpiece they feel more comfortable saying let's take that out because it's not quite a finished render yet either and you know you as a designer know that the answer is oh yeah for sure i'll take that out and i know that there's potential for something even better because my final product was never the

illustration it was the final design which is something that's beyond illustration that's the game itself the film itself and understanding the difference between that i think is really important as a concept artist and specifically as a concept artist that's successful in solving problems because i think first and foremost you're a problem solver more than you're just an illustrator or an artist so with your background in architecture like how do you feel like it applies to different areas of game design concept artists or art in particular like how do you feel it can help because i imagine as an architect you might talk to in for safety conduct reasons and stuff like that but you're not really talking to anyone else when you're creating these but in the entertainment world you're constantly in the middle of different

disciplines trying to make it look functional for all at the same time you know be open for the iterative process especially as a concept artist so yeah there are a few things that really align really nicely with architecture because the the one thing the misconception i think about creativity is that when it's just an open field day and you can create whatever you want but that is somehow a better situation than if somebody gives you a very specific very very specific puzzle to solve and the way all that creative potential really blossoms when you have these limitations on your design and when you understand that you can kind of create your own problems for example you can create your own limitations your own code that you then have to solve and it's not just some tedious exercise where you just like tell yourself where do i put the railing

it's more about you know both with thinking about the larger project in mind and how it's going to be constructed what are the building blocks of any given civilization what are the limitations on their their technology their materials their their beliefs their social structure the way they interact with their their gods or their history all these different things can be um they form they they sculpt your design without touching it but conceptually they sculpt it right because if you know somebody's worshiping the sun it may not make sense to put moons everywhere i mean it's like the obvious one but you know if you have these limitations the more you can craft these story elements and also work those into a flexible modular system of experimenting the more you can kind of bridge story

level design the actual environment um and kind of harmoniously put those together because i think sometimes concept art as concept art is kind of a vision and it's this blurry vision kind of handed off and you know then it's it's for everybody else to kind of make sense of and in a way if if you think more architecturally you can kind of understand the building blocks the repeating building blocks of a society or more of an environment and that both helps the continuity of your concept your art but it also helps the continuity into the actual environment building process where you know people have to the environment artists have to find some kind of system that works best for them to create what might be a very complex environment and how do you create one painting and give enough information to populate

an entire level you know in some cases the whole civilization with just that one like two paintings you know so that means that you have to build into it next up is with an old pal that i've worked with many times before joel durnam he's been back and forth in the visual effects companies as well as uh triple a companies and he was able to kind of talk with his latest hobby vr sculpting now this is when it was starting to get pretty hot and we can see how adobe uh acquired medium from oculus but also uh how substance painter is kind of teaming up with that team so this is all before that and we had the opportunity to kind of talk all things vr and how it kind of would influence a lot of the sculpting tools as well as painting tools of the future and which eventually came true and joel had the foresight to kind of get in on this on the ground floor uh while i was still a hobbyist type of thing

so this is from episode 257 vr sculpting with joel durnam like just in here and figure it out i don't have to go to youtube like i do on zbrush or you know it's like that one that one obscure feature that you're really looking for you have to google search for like 10 minutes but in here it's just it's all there for you yeah do that so i'll just wow can you technically is there a hdmi bluetooth tech like can you go completely wireless if you really want to actually you can i know it will cost you a significant amount of money to do that but yes you can definitely set that up i forget the company name but um i can i can always look it up and send it your way later dude this is looking yeah i can see why our heart surface is so possible and look at this this is the

other thing that i i just instantly fallen in love with and it's lagging a little bit right now just because the change that i made was so big it's having to like recalculate all the voxels but i mean still like that's a really nice smooth result you know yeah that's really nice yeah dude that looks awesome even have an elastic mode which is pretty phenomenal um how's its uh boolean tools uh are you able to like just chunk out stuff yeah it's really really nice actually that's probably one of my other favorite features about this as soon as see i i made the mistake of doing a really complicated uh

yeah it should allow you to play games while you're away oh [ __ ] i think i lost you yeah got you back let me what i'm going to do is i'm just going to hide that so that we don't have to deal with that resolution anymore and i'll just make a new layer here so how how did you go about to uh to creating fabric with this tool so here let me show you the training all right so this this thing gets extra points for being able to do like hard surface and soft surface was really like kind of the same tool set and then i forgot where i put my

my favorite one here we go primitives and this one all right so this one is absolutely one of my favorite primitives it's kind of like a rounded flattened cubish thing but you can get some really nice shapes with this one oh nice give me one second here because i think i need to delete some some layers because this shouldn't be lagging like that it's usually a little smoother just oh and the undo button is really nice it's just like you flick like left or right with the little joystick and you're good to go man all right here we go such a game changer there we go so now we're back to

nice overall performance here so like if you want to do some nice organic shapes you can really get in here start to kind of like switching back and forth pretty often between things so let's just like start to make a little arm type thing that we would put some cloth on and start smoothing all this stuff out there's like a there's a lot of settings for each uh tool you can go through so i'm just gonna pump the strength on this all the way up and smooth this out oh nice oh wow man zbrush 9 better do something dude

i know i know right yeah it's there's usually still on top of things but yeah the last two updates it's been kind of kind of low key yeah yeah not not much in the way of like new things huh yeah i mean they have like this nice filter they went instagram a bit but i didn't really think that was insane but yeah this is something that i would expect them to jump on man like this is what artist has been waiting for uh sculptors so you can see you can really just nice get in there and start to get these natural looking shapes so easily dude i can see how you get pretty uh lost in this

oh absolutely i think one of the most like fun things about it is taking like if you've been in it for a while and you take the headset off it takes a minute for your brain to actually realize that none of this stuff that you're working on is real like i i've literally taken off the headset before and like tried to point at the model and say like it's bringing my wife like hey look at look at what i worked on and i realized like it's not there it's only in a headset one more step towards the matrix yeah i know i know it really it's really getting crazy so how how was your transition because obviously you still prefer the usb brush in some cases right how was that man like being feeling somewhat restricted now not not having this uh vr set on and being able to scope like you you enjoy

um yeah i mean it's it's such an interesting transition because i i feel like a lot of people for a long time are going to use them in conjunction you know um i i almost feel like there's a world where they coexist for a little bit um obviously if zbrush decides to go uh full 3d and join vr then like you know it's it's going to be around for a long time but uh that's what i'm hoping happens yeah but right now you know just being able to do the block in or the concept art in here and then go to zbrush to refine it is like you know that's enough of a dream come true like i'm i'm happy you know yeah yeah just being able to even like get a shape going and use it as an insert mesh in here and then bring it back to refine it because

this is a great concepting tool just being able to figure things out in here is way more intuitive than having to keep spinning and right-clicking and spin uh like zooming in to kind of take a look at things yeah and then like the thing that really gets crazy is um because because you have your full wrist and you can twist yeah dude yeah that's a lot of control you know you can make like these really dynamic folds you know and and twist them into itself like i mean it's just unprecedented the level of control that you have with these things yeah yeah and looking at like all the the muscles that you're working right now too that was another thing that i was really excited about is i do not want to be chained to my desk uh you know like i want to be able to get up and like i can actually walk around this

whole thing and look at it from the other side or i can turn it you know like you're just you're so free that it's it's really refreshing and let me i'm going to switch gears here for a second just so i can show you some of the um organic stuff that i've been working on oh actually i just remembered i haven't saved that one yeah i think that spaceship is going to be fun so i'm just going to do that real quick and you can see that like the save doesn't really take that long either oh nice yeah vauxhall has not been either heavy or anything like that they're pretty light files i mean the advantage of voxel was made clear like years and years ago i mean that's what

minecraft is all about and it's crazy that we haven't really fully transitioned into that from polygons yet dude hell yeah dude i mean i i can't just imagining the stand next to your character must be a fun feeling oh man it's it's crazy because you can see in context like this thing you know let's say you were working on something that's supposed to be like 11 feet tall you know you can size it and you can look up at it and you can feel if that character feels right like it's it's really cool to be able to have the context of size [Music] and then just go with it does it have any like um aside from maybe posing but like animation that you can preview with rigging any of that sort that kind of helps make your character come alive

or is it too it's too early too early to do that i think there so there's there's another whole program that's out well i don't know if it's out or not but uh you can see a video of it on youtube where essentially this guy is just placing these joints in vr in 3d space and then when he's done it's rigged like he can grab the joints and like move the arms and it's all just dynamically figuring it out on the fly and i was just really impressed by that yeah because i can imagine like animators and riggers would have a field day with this the same way that we're enjoying the sculpting part like being able to like pose your character and key keep movements and stuff last but not least part of the gducks.me conference that we threw two years ago i invited an old friend damon woods and he too is currently at respawn working on

the star wars ip but he is a character artist as well as a teacher over at noman visual effects studio he was gracious enough to kind of walk through his personal project monstarz where he kind of went through the space damn characters reimagining him to today's uh all-stars from the nba and uh pretty much envisioned what they would look like if he were to kind of give the space jam esque treatment so this is from episode 280 the making of monstars remastered with damon woods enjoy 2d and and 3d artists and the ones that can do both are insanely talented and you can see through their expression uh how how there's a different this is there's a different type of flavor i i feel whenever i see like a master of everything kind of approaching a

particular project so very much the same way i think the old guards are always going to have a an issue how how much things are easier now quote unquote right but i i think for the anyone that has have the longest legs in the industry are the types that that embraces new tech that embraces new ways that completely opens up a different way of thinking uh to evolve as an artist uh to evolve as a developer to evolve as a businessman anything of that sort uh any time that you close off in a technology driven industry only spells trouble in my opinion right you're still out there talking about how crt tvs are are used to be the way of things you know no one's gonna take you seriously you're definitely showing your age a bit yeah

exactly and it's you know it's um the other thing that comes with the new tools is that the bar rises you have to rise with that bar um where you know a certain character used to take you know a month to finish now if the new tools along uh you know they've come along the expectation is to finish that same character in maybe two or three weeks um and so you have to kind of keep up with that and stay um up to date with all the tools um there's just no resting you know in this industry it's too competitive there's too many people out there churning out i mean i teach at norman i can tell you right now that next class is coming and they're they're pretty good they're like they know their stuff they grew up with these tools and so there's no barrier there and they're also being taught the fundamentals and stuff too because no one's great at that you still have you know traditional sculpting classes and drawing classes and these types of schools are popping up everywhere you know cgma all these different schools so um the competition is is pretty crazy out there so that alone is why you have to stay on top of it there's no you know

resting and um you know the true pros you know the people who really uh are excelling in this industry in the first place are the ones who love to do it um what they love you know have a love in their personal projects um or you know they they bring it into the studio too which is important um there's always going to be that that kind of drive there and you just need to make sure that you kind of keep that fire going keep the keep the pilot light lit on that and continue to kind of grow and progress and challenge yourself that's kind of my outlook on it when i look at these personal projects it is definitely uh marketable uh it's a good marketing opportunity too for yourself and that's really important actually as an artist because you want to you know you want to have your name out there because once again it's so competitive um there's a lot of you know killers out there and like they're you know they're really good at marketing themselves so you that's another thing that you need to kind of evolve and grow with that's kind of like where i'm i'm trying to uh improve on this year too um in the past i wasn't really great at

marketing myself i was just kind of like my nose to the grindstone and uh trying to turn stuff out trying to you know reach a certain level in my career um and and just work on projects that were appealing to me but there is a like kind of a a meeting point between those two worlds that you can live in where you can make something that people love to look at and it can blossom into things that you weren't even aware like you know like you can start you know busting all these pieces and sooner or later people want to buy those people want to buy prints from you people want to you know uh come you know watch your streams and so there's an opportunity to kind of uh share that and then share that knowledge with the with a bigger audience so yeah marketing this stuff is definitely a big part of it too um a lot of people grew up with space jam so i knew that would be a big one i'm actually working on a new series uh i if we have time i have to show you guys real quick uh something i'm working on like a sneak peek no one's seen this before yet but um i'm trying to get 3d printing so i'm i've been kind of messing around with uh

different stuff so i'm doing like my series on like a realistic mario so like this is like a whip right now ripped so yeah big rip mario so like it's like the smash bro smash brothers version that's that's before uh coveted mario right that's uh yeah that's funny protein yeah all that protein awesome it's got a bling on there dude so that's what i'm leaning on yeah yeah yeah so this is what i'm working on right now and uh um i'm gonna do it like a a more realistic yoshi and put them on his back and uh you know try to get some 3d prints out of this and see where it goes so this is my first attempt at something from the beginning planning it out as a 3d print yeah um i still plans on printing some of my older stuff but this one i just want to streamline for that um and uh hopefully you know i can kind of like

start developing new hobby and then maybe that hobby can turn into something else in the future but now just that's a way of keeping it fresh for me so that i don't kind of get bogged down in the same flow um every time yeah so explain to me while you're getting into this world i'm sure you have a lot more character art friends than i do right so 3d printing has become like quite synonymous with character developers uh character artists in the game industry it just seems to be like a natural extension of your skill set you know i'm already sculpting it now why don't i print it so i can hold things um from at least your beginning understanding of that industry i mean how uh what what is that world like like is there like a i know that you're you're kind of approaching this as a hobbyist but i mean is there a potential uptake in that in in building a business venture or any extension beyond just just making cool cool art pieces absolutely and you know if you look at some of the other uh really successful

3d artists out there who are um uh kind of branching out and uh kind of monetizing themselves they all started from just being uh a fan and a student of of character art and art in general and they kind of blossomed out from that um usually very organically you know like um you they start off just you know really enjoying making art and then they'll build a fan base sooner or later and then you start getting requests from like man like can i can i print that out i would love to have that as a print and it's like well like maybe what's this 3d printing stuff maybe i should look into that and you start you know you kind of go down that rabbit hole and then you discover prints for yourself and then you start busting these out and before you know it you know different collectible companies are hitting you up for contract work or or maybe you know speaking of contract work maybe you're you're a contractor and um after a while you build a a clientele to the point where you decide to maybe branch out and create your own contracting business where you uh you know just you're an outsourced company

all of that kind of organically comes from you know you know starting at that grassroots place kind of building it organically um and uh building up a clientele and a fan base uh from there and uh that's kind of like where i'm trying to uh go to that's like the kind of the next step in things is uh you know i'm still kind of a student of the you're always a student of the craft but at the same time i think teaching to that next group is really important so i've tried to you know set aside time to teach um at the same time uh grow like other businesses um as far as like uh outsourcing and just really helping out like studios um where they need it because i think that's really important yeah i mean that's um i think that's one of the biggest benefits of uh of being an instructor and and being a part of uh the new crop of developers uh at the same time you're you're in the forefront of uh giving back to the community which is huge i want to thank

you for that and um and and you learn a lot by teaching right you you kind of better your your knowledge your foundation at the same time you know a part of you is like scouting the talent right you're like all right how many how many years i got left before these guys take my job right uh because they're coming in cheaper and more and more more willing right i mean there's a lot of things stacked with them right i mean if they come with the skill set of course of course it's a huge huge plus uh that's not to downplay you know experienced veterans right i mean there's a place there's a reason why aaa studios or what they call quad a studios now want to hire senior professionals because there's a certain i would say patience right there's a certain quality an approach a certain general aspect of game development that requires a senior professionals to kind of take hold and and be leads right because come on right

just hand the key kid to the i mean hand the kid to the keys to the car and just expect him to be suddenly driving these multi-million dollar projects it's that's one thing and that's fine yeah absolutely and that's uh you know um when you you know kind of put your years in and you pay your dues that's ultimately like everyone's different obviously everyone has their different ambitions um i've always seen it as yeah like um i don't plan to be a production artist forever as much as i love it it can wear on you especially the way the industry is going right now crunch is becoming more and more uh just an accepted cultural thing in the game industry um but there's other avenues and i think uh as artists sometimes we kind of accept um the way things are where you know there's other avenues you can go to kind of you know build for yourself you know um outsourcing is obviously going to become more prevalent in these years especially you know the way things are going um as

an artist i'm just talking about as an individual artist you know working from home working remotely and then also just keeping in mind uh smaller studios that don't uh require as much crunch obviously the largest studios they're gonna you know it it kind of is what it is right now hopefully there's reform coming but i went bank on it because like you know there's the quality bar is at a place right now where you can't go backwards you can only go forward and it just takes a lot of hours it takes a lot of iteration and it takes a lot of people who just love that lifestyle and there there are those people out there and i used to be one of those people i still am i still really love um just grinding on something until the late hours but there's also a part of me that was like well i've got a kid on the way you know i want to spend some some time with my family oh thank you um and so you know just kind of exploring those other avenues that maybe uh don't go down that same path all right that concludes today's episode hopefully you guys are enjoying that i

had fun adding art boost as part of the game dev unchained podcast episodes and i'm looking forward to adding more of that and maybe not restricting it to just our boost per se and inviting other um developers as well to kind of work through their personal projects so i think personal projects if anything is a great uh way to uh pave the future of your own destiny whether it can become an indie thing but also to practice aspiring towards other disciplines that you're not normally doing from at your nine-to-five job so that concludes today's episode hopefully you guys enjoy the series so far see you guys on the next one [Music]

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