What's your best modeling advice for an amateur CG artist? This person specifically uses Modo and ZBrush at the moment.

For starters, the software really doesn't matter that much, I would say. You can use Blender, it's free. Or you just try to get a version from your uni or so; if you're using Maya or Max, that's also good. Most of the people in the industry use Maya or Max, so that's always a safe bet, I would say. But what's most important is that you keep doing work. Even if it's not good in the beginning, just continue, don't stop doing your work, try to improve. Try to get into fields that you're interested in. If you like characters, go into characters. And if you go more for weapons, then try to do a lot of weapons, right? Try to learn more about weapons, how they work. Because, for example, on weapons, you need to understand the mechanics behind it a little bit at least. So, yeah, it's always helpful to have a proper mindset for what you're doing. And that's really important.

Yeah. I think using reference is a very important thing when you're starting out as well. Also, there are tons of communities out there for getting feedback and stuff. You'll find that there are a lot of communities where you'd have industry veterans in Discords and stuff. You can get feedback from them. They can tell you where you're making mistakes with your modeling. I think reproducing a shape is quite easy. Reproducing a shape elegantly is where the challenge is in what I would call production art. We're not necessarily concept artists. We're not designing these forms ourselves, but we're reproducing them with a set of criteria. If you think about it like pixel art, if you're a pixel artist, you're employing a bunch of techniques to reproduce something in that sort of style. This is sort of similar. If you're interested in video games specifically, getting into being a 3D artist for video games, definitely learning about the techniques that we employ is going to get you a long way. Or if you're interested in CGI, like film and stuff, they use a whole other bag of tricks.

Probably modeling for them looks like the concept you showed before. So for film, of course, they need to look that they don't use five million polygons for a screw, but they don't care too much about the polygon quality. That's more for game art, that we have to look at how optimized it is. For example, for this piece we have 200 polygons, and for films you could use a couple of thousand for this piece alone here.

Real-time rendering means we're rendering the asset 60, 120, however many frames per second. So it's very specialist hardware doing a very specialist task. For films, they chuck it on an offline render, you have a server farm, it'll just be absolutely chugging away, so they can render an hour of footage over 20 computer weeks or whatever. I'm not sure what the ratios are. I'm not too up to date on the film industry specs. But for games, it's got to run. It's got to run at a frame rate that is sufficient for people to actually interact with it.

And that's why when you're working on games, you're really a technical modeler. So a big part of our work is not, I would say, art in the traditional sense of just doing nice things. It's also a lot of work that goes into learning the techniques. And for games especially, you need to know how to do your stuff. And then with the knowledge you have, you can do art. But coming to a point where you're so good that you basically know it in and out and can just do content over and over, that's a hard way, definitely.

You've also got to consider the fact that hard surface modeling, like what we're doing here, is creating machined, industrial things. That's only a single facet of what it can mean to be a game artist. You could be an environment artist, in which case you're making terrain, you're making rocks, you're making that kind of stuff. We do a bit of that on the props team. Or you could be a character artist, studying anatomy, learning about how muscles and faces and stuff work.