For someone studying 3D animation and modeling: is 3D animation and modeling experience necessary for a 3D character artist, to have enough anatomy skills, or should they just focus on clothing depending on the character?

I think I would break the question into two sections. First, if you want to be a character artist, and second, if you want to be a concept artist. A concept artist is mostly dealing in just the visual side, so you're going to be doing stuff like potentially a 2D painting, so you're not going to need to know necessarily how it moves. You're not going to have to know as much on the 3D side. Obviously, if you do, it's really helpful, like Jeremiah does, and he can get into 3D and block stuff out, and that's great. And then if you want to be a character artist, you absolutely need to know modeling stuff. Knowing anything about animation is going to be helpful, because that's basically one of the next teams that your work will go to. So depending on the job that they're shooting for, the requirements are different.

Because there is a way to model very responsibly, versus adding a lot of polygons in areas where it doesn't need that much. For instance, you would need a lot of geo right here because there's a lot of movement right here. But putting a lot of geo, let's say here, where there's not as much movement, that would be very irresponsible. So knowing where to place polygons is very important.

That's an important skill in every aspect of game development. There was a version of the Freelancer, not the version of the Freelancer that's there now, but remember the one that had all the tiny little rivets?

Every screw was 900 polygons.

Every single rivet in the Freelancer was 900 polygons. That Freelancer had a bigger resource footprint than the Idris. Ships have come a long way. We were learning how to build ships.

That was more of an alpha ship because, just to shorten the process of what happened there, literally the concept art was taken and put into the game for alpha purposes.

We had a door that was one million polys before, a long time ago. One million polys for a single door. And there were four doors in the level. So four million polys.

Actually, to break down what we're talking about too, what Jeremiah was mentioning with the flow of polygons and geometry would be called topology. So clean topology is very important for a character artist when working with animators, but less so for a concept artist.

I don't give a crap. Because for me, at the end of the day, it's make pretty picture good.