I remember a moment very vividly from my childhood that has shaped how I want to build my worlds.
I was sat up right in the rickety old wooden bunk bend, head craned against the ceiling and the cramped green walls of my bedroom as huddled around me as I was in a Doctor Who bed sheet. My mum sat on the car-shaped toyboy with her glasses rested on the bridge of her nose and a crumbled book in her hand. "Beyond the Deepwoods" I would cheer when she pulled it from the shelf, the cover a beautiful illustration by a life long favourite Chris Riddle that glistened with characters of all shapes and sizes.
As she read, she'd show me the illustrations with their intricate line and ink work, their larger than life art style rendered lovingly with a nobbled, imperfect sense of reality; most of whom I still remember to this day. I remember Twig, the misfit hero, who strays into the woods on a path to find his true family. I remember the Banderbear, who's fearsome fangs and heavy frame hide a nurturing and gently persona. I remember the red elves in their prickly vests, the blood maidens that drink blood red sap from a winding mother tree, and the dread GlomGlozer who's shadow lurks across bedroom doorways like our very own boogie man. But all these wonderful characters are denizens of a place, The Edge, a world unlike any other with towns and bogs and forests as haunting and real as those same people. Santiphrax, the city that floats on a huge moored rock, the Mire and its tainted, fatal bogs, the Twilight forest where death never relives you, the Deepwoods with it's snared nightmares and of course, the titular beyond: an uncharted nowhere marked only by that Glomglozer.
Why, you might be asking, is this important? Well, ever since then, I've toiled with this conflict and in becoming a CG artist, I find it harder and harder to pry the two apart. I love the character. I love the worlds. But no good artist worth his or her pay packet can do both to a AAA standard. Try as I might to balance the two, it's becoming achingly obvious that there is an ever widening schism down the centre and soon I'll have to jump to one or the other. Not that the two are a world a part, many of the techniques and talents I've grown or acquired are applicable in some capacity to both, but the beautiful nuances are what sell these things, and more importantly, the nitty-gritty technicalities, especially in games.
Let's weigh the pros and the cons
Character:
+ Focused and bespoke assets that rely on craft and unique vision
+ Unique characters are integral to almost any good fiction
+ The anatomy and the science of biology offers a huge challenge
+ Linear pipelines (when working alone at least) that offer the chance to really refine the work.
- Anatomy is hard. Very hard. Like really hard.
- Characters are a highly competitive field with so many absolutely phenomenal artists dominating the field.
- Having been mostly self taught as an artist, I feel I am not as fitted to some of the fundamentals of character creation such as form, though I've studied it to no end.
- Characters are self contained and offer little in the way of player driven story discovery.
Environments:
+ Westeros. Instillation 04. Lothric. New Vegas. These are places I have never visited but will never leave me.
+ Environments provide a chance for environmental storytelling that is ambiguous and nuanced.
+ Modular design tickles that LEGO block building part of my imagination.
+ I've spent more time building environments than characters over the years.
- Environments often rely on a much greater collection of assets and work, narrowing the amount of time that can be spent on them individually.
- Games have a lot of technical tricks that I'm still learning such as vertex painting and repeating texture authoring.
- Environments are a huge undertaking and can't be turned around at the rate of a character.
I feel like I lean closer to the environment part professionally. This comes down to a generally more developed understanding of hard surface or prop assets over individual characters and the fact that to compete in a character art job, you need to be amazing and that I am not. The question remains unanswered but I suppose in time I'll hopefully fall into one, or more likely, I'll stubbornly commit to both and succeed at neither!
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