The Roles of a Video Game Artist - 3D Animation and Design
By Cody Landon
How often do we hear people that have careers complain about never doing the job they
were trained to do? They did not realize when they entered into their chosen field that
there would be many aspects to the job.

Image created with 3D character modeling
The same premise applies with the video game artist. Before really researching the
subject many would be artists think it is just a matter of sitting down and designing a
game and then putting it into production and it is ready to play. It does not quite work
that way. If it did there would probably be even more games on the market than there
already are. Video game artists have such a variety of jobs to do that many of these jobs
have somewhat evolved into becoming specialties.
A good example of this is the concept artist. In other words the idea maker. It is his
job to be creative and dream up the various characters and the types of atmosphere it will
demand.. Once it is put to paper it is scanned into the computer and it is cleaned up
using a software program with these types of capabilities such as Photoshop for example.
Now we are still at the rough stage and color now has to be introduced.
This is where the texture artist now fulfills his roll. It is his job to create the
texture for the colors, and then it moves onto the 3D model builder. So where did the role
of the video game artist end? Actually, it did not; the video game artist may have been
doing any one, several or all of the duties as outlined.
To become a concept artist you need to be yourself, you cannot really take training to
be one. Simply being because it is based on creativity. No one can teach you to be
creative, but they can teach you to develop your natural creativity. This is usually done
by practice and more practice. You can never reach a plateau where you can say you have
mastered it all, it just does not happen with the arts. Another thing to remember is doing
not be a copier, be a creator. It does not take much creativity to sit down and copy
anothers work.
Be observant, watch things how they move, animals, humans and even the elements. By
doing this you will perfect your skills in proper proportions, and skeletal structure. The
setting you are going to place your characters in is almost as important as the characters
themselves. You are setting the atmosphere, which in turn sets the theme.
You may decide that you want to specialize in 2D or 3D animation, which is great. It
means you are going to have to determine the levels of the various games and edit them as
necessary. You may even have the responsibility of that of the texturing artist.
Now the 2D texturing artist has the job of texturing all of the elements found within
the game as it pertains to the 3D objects. This can be greatly perfected and enhanced by
the use of good quality software designed for this purpose.
Discover how to create cutting-edge 3D animations like Pixar in 5 minutes or less...
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