Character Artist in an Outsource Studio: What’s the Job Like?

While we are waiting for our first Character Artist TRACE Bootcamp launch, we decided to release a series of thematic posts about working as a character artist here in Trace Studio. We’ll talk about what you should be expecting if you want to try yourself as an artist in a studio. We’ll debunk myths, share curious details and discuss stereotypes.

Today we’ll start easy: what character types exist and what do character artists do?

Character Types

Characters may be completely photorealistic, sometimes highly stylized, and sometimes it’s something in between: a fairly realistic character with a slight degree of stylization.

All the while artists in studios like ours rarely have a narrow specialization, as there aren’t so many differences between photorealistic and stylized characters. The requirements are similar, and the project style adds only a few conventions. Basic work with character is always arranged the same way and doesn’t depend on the project or style.

Where Content Comes From

Studios like ours make characters that customers need. There are a lot of projects, they are all different. It’s important to understand that you can’t just do characters that you like and get paid for it. Being an artist in a studio is certainly interesting and creative, but it’s still a job. The decisive opinion in all situations rests with the customer, the characters aren’t always as interesting as we would like them to be, and in general, it’s an ordinary daily work like at any other job, where diligence, patience and goal commitment won’t hurt.

How Character Creation in Different Projects Works

The variety of projects is both a plus and a minus. Among the cool and exciting projects, there are also those where the most interesting stages of work are excluded.

Everybody knows that character creation includes high-poly, low-poly retopology, mapping, baking, texturing, but sometimes we receive ready high-poly characters, and the work starts with retopology. Sometimes texturing on our side is not needed at all. Sometimes texturing is more interesting and artistic, and sometimes it’s just throwing flat materials that will be changed many times later. There are a lot of routine processes: retopology, mapping, baking. They rarely seem exciting to anyone, but they have to be done, there’s no getting away from it. At the same time, if you are tired of doing the same style characters оn a long project, the studio allows you to painlessly switch to another project and work with other content, to level up in something else.

Projects and characters are different, so are the processes. There is a job for any preference and interest in the studio! And often, work in game development starts with a hobby. So, in general, artists do the work they love and get paid for it. They say, it’s cool :)