Character/tech artist (Dragonage, Where The Wild Things Are, Unreal 04, Civ IV, D&D Online, God of War:CoO, Stellaris ++) Writer. Minis. Intersex. (SHE/HER)
Ohi, I am a freelance senior technical artist and art director with several decades of experience in AAA games, film and TV. You probably shot some of my work in the face... go you! I hope you got lots of XP.
I am now writing Violent Triangles, the game artist handbook!
I had a dream that I woke up as the wife of this really nice guy. I explained to him I wasn't really his wife and that I was from another reality and just dreaming, and he said "oh, I know. This happens to her every couple of months. It's nice to meet you."
I remember a kid being beaten to bloody pulp because they suspected he way gay.
So no, you wouldn't fucking hear about kids suffering gender dysphoria you absolute shitstain of a human being.
Having over 20+ yrs experience & several games of the year under my belt, Transitioning from presenting male to female goes like this.
As male: headhunted by studios, flown to interviews overseas.
As female: email response to CV "we don't think you would be happy here"
Hello, I am a character artist with over 20 years experience and several game of the years under her belt.
If someone says "we didn't add girls because it costs too much" punch them in the head with their own asshole, because it actually doesn't.
I was lead character artist at Ubisoft on the preproduction of Assassins Creed. I made Rocksteady's Batman for the pitch to DC. I was lead character artist on Unreal Tournament 2004. I made the first Dragonage Grey Warden for the launch trailer...
The 'I' in LGBTIQA stands for intersex. We are really common- hi, hello! Precise stats are difficult because definitions are completely arbitrary. But around 1% of the population is a commonly kicked around figure. As common as redheads.
Executive dysfunction can be like trying to play a video game with the controller disconnected.
You know what you need to do, you want it, you know the stakes if you dont and you are pressing on the controller... but no signal goes through.
You can't. It hurts to try.
Okay some
#adhd
tips since on the subject:
1: externalise time.
You don't perceive time the same way as neurotypical folk and cannot estimate time easily. Don't even try.
Use external things like MULTIPLE alarms, timers, voice messages.
'Mansplaining' is not 'a man explaining something'.
It is the assumption made by a man that a woman knows less than he does about a subject based on her gender alone.
Okay. There you go. One painting done with paints.
Because I went to fucking school and learned how.
Now go off and learn what a tech artist does you absolute spanner.
#gamedev
@gameart
tip.
The most common mistake I see taught is that you must keep everything in quads (4 sided polygons).
This results in artists leaving a whole mess of edges in a model that actually don't need to be there at all.
A reminder that one symptom of
#adhd
is task paralysis. You are unable to start a task, regardless of motivation or importance of the task.
You WANT to do it, you HAVE to do it and you are telling yourself to do it... but the body simply doesn't respond.
Trump: I tested positive for Covid... actually I tested more positive than anyone. Doctors are amazed by how positive I tested, they can't believe it, they tell me, Donald, you are over 100 percent covid, it defies known science, which of course... science is fake news...
Corridor digital decided to take a crap on the entire games industry full of character artists without understanding the two things we have to face- strict rendering limitations and ridiculous deadlines.
They don't "fix" things with their AI clickbait. They just cause damage.
Concept art is NOT illustration.
Concept art is NOT illustration.
Concept art is NOT illustration.
Concept art is NOT illustration.
Concept art is NOT illustration.
Concept art is NOT illustration.
There is a terrible trend in modelling flat butts in video game male characters that cannot support their weight to avoid straight men feeling uncomfortable gay feelings.
Stop it.
Signed. A lesbian 3d character artist who sculpts butts on her boys.
Turns out he was gay, but so where three guys and two girls in the class as well. Also two are bi and one intersex and trans. Out of 30 kids.
And we didn't fucking tell each other jack shit because none of us wanted to be beaten shitless.
That's what the 80s and 90s was.
Please support and normalize smaller games with less content.
If we normalise shorter games, the financial risk goes down for smaller teams. Crunch lessens and games become more polished.
I propose "weekender" games as a genre. A game that entertains you for one weekend.
The AAA model being adopted isn't about making games, it is about attracting investor capital on a hype curve.
It's a sick circus trick, and the only way to stop it is forming thousands of small studios that retain the talent and starve out the boomfarming scumbags.
Bro what the fuck??????????? I'm so tired of this shit.
My whole timeline is full of game devs losing their shit because we're not even done with January 2024 and we're at HALF the layoffs of 2023.
WHO THE FUCK WILL MAKE YOUR FUCKING GAMES???????
None of the AAAs are safe ffs
Yes. I absolutely had privilege.
Yes. I knew I would lose privilege.
No. I had no idea the full extent.
No. Women are not making it up when they tell you the way they are ignored, undermined, talked over and passed over.
If your cyberpunk doesn't include transgender and nonbinary people, it isn't cyberpunk and you have missed the whole point of exploring the transhuman experience.
At best, you are just decorating people with chrome.
*hacks mainframe, replaces corporation logos with limp dicks*
Okay, so I keep seeing artists retopologising by essentially running evenly spread quads along something like a muscular arm or heavily wrinkled leg.
Like this...
A video game that simulates
#ADHD
. The mission objective changes at random every few minutes and whenever you walk into a new room, your inventory shuffles one item and sometimes it becomes invisible for a few minutes.
You auto steer into table corners.
Some things people do not realise is
#adhd
related because people think it is "just about being easily distracted."
Knowing these would have changed my whole life.
Here is how big game companies work. Everyone doing the work get paid like regular jobs, they don't have shares in the profit.
So, once a product ships if you buy it or not doesn't "support" those developers.
They have already been paid. Many have already been laid off.
One thing people need to understand about human biology is that your DNA carries all the instructions to make a human of any sex.
Most humans have 48 chromosomes- 23 pairs called autosomes and the two which you know called the sex chromosomes- X and Y.
#gamedev
tip: character progression doesn't have to be watching numbers slowly tick up.
It can be shown visually in animations. Character poses can shift from noob to expert, weak to strong, flinching to confident.
One thing I noticed about Starfield is the character smiles have an issue with the orbicularis oculi muscle not contracting to give a "Duchenne smile".
I was holding my two year old daughter on a walk moments ago and out of nowhere she said,
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"
As she squirmed and slithered in my arms, I realised with a slow dawning horror that I never had a daughter.
EA exec want to put ads in the games you paid for. Ubisoft exec wants you to lease games instead of owning them. Microsoft exec thinks closing company that makes small award winning games will help them make small award winning games.
Absolute evil clown industry.
Oh, and one of the companies that headhunted me for lead cinematics modeler as a male, turned me down instantly as a female for a junior art director role- I had 8 years experience as art director.
The end to this story is, as adults, we all know who the LGBTIQA+ people are and the entire class are totally friendly and supportive now.
It's just because we grew up with the poisonous bullshit peddled by assholes like the OP that as kids we felt we had to react violently.
Game artist advice: Being able to make your own shaders will give you a great deal of artistic power, and save you a lot of time and suffering.
You only need to learn a few simple tricks, and each one you learn opens up a great deal of options.
3D artists mispronouncing common terms:
Euler is pronounced "oil-er".
Bezier is pronounced "bezz-y-ey"
Wacom is pronounced "waah-kom"
Fresnel is pronounced "Frennel"
Worcestershire is pronounced "wuuster sher"
Adobe is pronounced "ass-hole"
There is no ethical use of AI art.
There is no future for humanity in a world where all human endeavour is stolen and boiled down to something that replaces humans.
What do humans do in a world where humans are not employed to create?
Is that a world you want to live in?
#gamedev
Okay so lemme just drop a serious lesson about game design for this whole trending thing.
Why is this the ideal design and can we boil it down further.
Yes, we can.
If you are reading this there is a chance you are working on your first game project. You may be at home, staring at a computer, feeling uncertain emotions and worrying if all this is worth it.
This is for you...
I am an intersex person who had gender dysphoria and transitioned.
Living as a 'man', I was successful in my career and lived a good middle class life with a healthy love life- a series of long term partners and I eventually married my college crush.
Just to clarify, I don't think I am *entitled* to a job.
No, I am *qualified* for a job.
Just like I was four years ago.
Only now I have to deal with men who think me being upset with inequality somehow equals me feeling entitled.
Go get a *cheaper* haircut, you jerk.
Quick
#gamedev
tip: watch out for pointless geo created by loop cutting. (It is a badly taught myth that game geo has to be in quads) so you can massively reduce your data across the entire game.
But of course, what would I know?
It's not like I was game development consultant for 3dsmax, or model consultant for turbosquid. Or, yunno, helped pioneer tension mapping in games or bridging tools or cloth sim based unwraps or modular dungeon shell systems or anything.
...I worked on Carol for Where The Wild Things Are.
I helped design the character modelling tools for Autodesk 3dsmax and provided the demo fishman that shipped with the product and was used for all the training.
I made all the cinematic characters for Fury and the opening of...
And I was special guest live on stage at the 3dsmax launch where I had to speed model a character live on stage infront of the entire max user group- an audience containing Blizzard, Blur, etc etc and got a standing ovation.
So yeah. I have even modelled a character bro.
Let me drop another bomb here folks. Game development degrees are completely worthless.
You spend several years learning from a curriculum that is out of date by the time you arrive, and by the time you leave you have no hiring advantage over a hobbyist.
A neat way to ensure characters rarely end up arse up or kneeling is have one leg have higher IK maximum angles and mass- this means on leg "gives" a little more and the character topples to one side.
My “Ragdolls in Different Games” series, which I started after my reload shtick. While this wasn’t as successful, it stood on its own pretty well. I should make more of these, it’s just hard on my body.
Stealing art from a gallery also requires some level of skill. But it still the skill of stealing.
Ending up with the mona lisa in the back of your van is not the same as being able to paint the mona lisa.
You absolutely worthless stain of a human being.
Quick
#gamedev
#gameart
tip: A really good exercise in learning where your topology should go to get great low poly deformation is to imagine your mesh as a Starwars Stormtrooper suit- made of rigid plates and rubber.
The outer shape of the plates (blue) are the important bit
Positive spin
#DnD
adventure ideas.
The villagers have a problem with goblins in the mines. They don't have clean water and the villagers worry the goblins may get sick.
...Civilization IV.
I have several decades of character work, ranging from TV commercials through to films, several AAA game of the years and a bunch of indy titles.
I have worked for Microsoft, Turbosquid, Autodesk, The Foundry, Claytools Haptics, Liquid, Fuel, Animal logic
As a professional 3D character artist whose career has spanned pretty much the whole of real time character technology let me comment on this image from Meta...
I have a bronze lion from the Cannes Film Awards for my character work on the Comcast Rabbit Panther Thingie.
I have been hairdresser to Kratos and all the gods for Chains of Olympus.
I have made dancing Ribena Berries and horny Teddy Bears and Orcs and Mumaks for...
Just remember when a character in a 3D game is talking to you on a video screen, they are most likely talking to you from a box hidden under the floor.
I am intersex, and decided to transition from presenting male to female. I figured, my industry is very lefty and cool, this should be okay. I may lose a few friends and contacts but on the whole my experience should carry me forward.
Nope.
So, I got paid to spend a day with a Sphinx cat breeder to get reference for a TV commercial we were doing at Animal Logic.
I was covered in Sphinx cats all day.