It’s nice making funky 3D models, isn’t it? Sitting there painting them with your lovely graphics tablet, crafting the high-resolution source model from which all that glorious real-time lighting will derive? Yeah, it’s fun that bit.
Not so much the bit where you have to UV the whole damned thing up, or fiddle around with all those annoying vertices around the shoulder so that when the guy raises his arm just a little bit everything doesn’t screw up and look shit. Or the bit where something goes wrong on export and the whole thing appears in game as a big bag of spikes.
Actually, scratch that last one – that’s pretty amusing actually, just as long as the deadline is waaaay over there, somewhere.
So forget 3D art – back to basics, 2D… click… click… click… click… click… OH GOD I’M STILL ON FRAME ONE.
No, it’s no good. On balance, fun = (good bits / bad bits) works out pretty much indistinguishable from zero. It all sucks. Worst of all, if you’re one of those jack-of-all-trades artist types, you’ll find yourself immeasurably useful during all the sucky bits and horribly out-classed when the good bits finally arrive.
Witness all those fellow artists enjoying themselves being better than you and, oh have a problem do we? Hand it over to muggins here and I’ll sort out the tedious bit for you so you can get back to having fun.
So. Why all games artists should learn how to code.
I don’t mean start writing 3D engines or anything complicated. Just a nice little bit of code. A little biscuit to compliment the tea of art production, if you will.
Firstly and obviously, it doesn’t hurt to understand just a squidge of the sorts of things going on under the bonnet. It might help stop you naming assets “Copy of Bob(1).Max” or trying to check files into AlienBrain which are stored on your desktop.
But more importantly, writing little programs isn’t half a blessed relief from the click… click… click… of pixel art or the tedium of moving UV co-ordinates around while your eyes go funny from staring at the checkerboard you’ve temporarily assigned to the mesh.
And not only that, but with C# a free download away, MaxScript or MelScript sitting there dormant while you’re modelling, you can write something useful. Something that can save you time and remove just a smidge of that tedium and tip the balance a little back towards the good bits.
And now more than ever, it couldn’t be easier to write applications even if you don’t know much about writing applications. And there’s this thing called The Internet where there’s like, loads of tutorials and stuff.
As a side benefit artists that know how to code generally get to be best friends with the rendering code team as their assets are not the one’s in the wrong file format, resolution and naming convention (all at once usually). When you are best friends with your rendering coder he or she will listen to you when you want to make endless little visual changes to the shaders rather than telling you to piss off.
The artist who understands how to program even a modest amount is truly a king among men. The artist who can write his own reasonably efficient shader code is probably going to be the most respected man in the whole team apart from maybe that one guy who can actually understand the PS3.
Absolutely, although I’d argue that shader coding is a little scary and if I said to an artist who hadn’t done any programming before, “hey why not program a shader?” and then showed them a tutorial, I’d probably put them off programming for life 😉
Visual Basic / Visual C# are more accessible languages to get into to start, with the up-side of resulting in funky little Windows applications.
Oh I totally agree, efficient shader coding can be pretty math heavy and certainly perplexing especially to the novice.
It does have the advantage though of being a thing artists can fiddle with in Max and also a thing where a one line, or even one number, change will almost always make an instantly visible impression on the screen.
Yeah, although the trouble with writing shaders for Max is there’s a whole additional nightmare to contend with to make it compatible. Pissing about with something in nVidia’s shader tool is one thing, getting the thing to work in Max is quite another.
Having said that, there are funky shader-making flow-charty plugins for Max which are a good place to start if you’re more interested in the result than the underlying nuts and bolts of it.