Assignment 1 Research p5 - 3D Artist

The last area of research I will be doing before I write the conclusion, which is 3D Art. Coming into the course as someone with outside knowledge and understanding, I've always been most intrigued with 3D character design. The E-Book "Ultimate Level Design" has again proven a valuable source of information as far as the role of environment artist is concerned, although I have also been reading through some "3D Artist" magazines I had at hand, as well as broader internet exploration. It has also been beneficial to be able to explore elements in Valve Source SDK's Model Viewer and Source Filmmaker to observe ingame objects.  
And before I go on, I'm sure that there is some connection to 2D art that could be included in here as well, relating to menu and hud graphics, but that might be overthinking the work somewhat.

In essence, the role of the 3D artist can be divided into roughly the same areas as that of the concept artist with character and environment artists as well as creature and vehicle artists... there is also a role relating to prop artists, responsible for creating the props that will populate the ingame world and provide interactivity and believability. The 3D artist works with the programmers, level designers and the concept artists to add detail and texture to the game world. Reference photos and artwork remain important at this stage to provide guidance towards what sort of world is being made.

The role of environment artist for example involves more than simply adding graphics and detail to the maps they work on, a lot of importance can be placed also on their ability to use colour and lighting to guide the player through the level and help to distinguish explorable areas from those that are out of bounds.

The prop artist is something of a varied role and responsible for populating the in game world with objects that can range from scenery to items for the player to interact with or pick up and use... for example, cars, barrels or weapons.

Character artists last of all are responsible for creating the character models... although again depending on the game in question, there can be some variations. Chiefly, if one is to consider an FPS game, models need to be created for npc characters like most other games, but models also need to be designed for limbs from the player's perspective, chiefly for the weapons that will be used.

In all, I have found this to be an area that holds a little interest to me... although it remains mostly something that intrigues rather than ignites passion to specialise in this area so far.