Games of Experience
The ultimate resource on:
Video game development
Ben Mathis is a freelance artist who works for CAOZ Ltd. as a 3D artist, modeler and lighter. In this interview he talks about how he got where he is, how he learned to be an artist, and he shares his experiences of moving from studio to studio (literally all around the world). He’s currently working on Legends of Valhalla | Thor: www.legendsofvalhalla.com
Name: Ben Mathis
Job Title: 3D artist, modeler and lighter
Company: at CAOZ Ltd.
Location: Reykjavik, Iceland
Portfolio: http://www.poopinmymouth.com/
GOE: How much did you learn in school and how much was self-taught?
“I’d say the majority of my 3d skills were self taught, and 90% of my photoshop skills were self taught. I had an amazing photoshop teacher that I still use some of his classroom knowledge to do my job. There is a big problem in most schools getting good teachers who know the material. It´s a combo of needing people with masters degrees to stay acredited, low salaries that can´t compete with actual job salaries (and the ones you’d want could get an industry job) and not that many people who actually desire to teach.”
GOE: Which of the two learning-styles holds more potential for jobs in the game industry, in your opinion?
“Well you have the catch-22 of no one wanting to hire someone totally unknowledgable, so you have to teach yourself a lot before the job even starts or you won’t get the chance to learn on the job.”
GOE: You studied in Virginia and Savannah. How did you end up in Germany?
“Hah, that’s a long trip. First job was in Texas, then moved around to DC and LA for work, got tired of living in the states and had a long term remote contract so I went to Switzerland and Iceland and Germany hopping around. I loved Iceland and met the guy who is now my husband, so I decided to settle there for a while. We ended up getting married in Iceland, but wanted a change of scenery for a bit, he had lived in Dusseldorf and spoke fluent German, and one of my best friends lived in Köln. He acquired a job before we moved, and I was doing freelance and renovating our flat, but then a job opened up at BlueByte on The Settlers 7.
We ended up not gelling as well as we’d like socially, though the country was lovely and I quite prefer the German system of government to the States, and we missed our friends and family in Iceland, so we moved back in early 2009 and have since bought a house, so we’re here for a while. I’m now working in film as a 3d modeler and lighter on Iceland’s first 3d feature.”
GOE: My, you’ve roamed around quite a bit in the games industry. You’ve had quite a set of different artist roles. What skills do you think are absolutely necessary for every artist to have? What is the ‘perfect’ artist like?
“Gotta be quick on your feet to learn new tools. The guy who can teach the rest of the team new stuff or can be dumped into a new role and be up and running in a few days is the one that stays when teams need cutting (if management is smart, that is) and the one who gets good recommendations. I’ve also had the luck of just each job really working on stuff that looks good on the resume either tech or title-wise. The perfect artist is inquisitive but a self-starter, and works a lot outside of bare-bones required knowledge to be really well rounded and always getting faster.”
GOE: All the roaming around must have given you the opportunity to get to know the many diversities in the game industry. Different studios, different people, different games.. what do you love about it? What do you notice, is it all really that different? And where did you have the best time and why?
“Actually seeing so many studios has been depressing. I love real time art and game creation, but the industry has some serious growing up to do. I know that makes me sound like a curmudgeon, but most game themes bore me, most art styles are anything but stylish, and the way employees are treated is rather loathsome with a lack of profit sharing and way too much unpaid overtime.
The most fun has been at Neversoft on GUN and pre-production on the sequal that never made it out the door. It was a team of great artists, an established pipeline, and killer producers. Producers really make or break the project. They need to know how to plan, and also to stand up to upper management to protect the workers and be realistic about what’s possible. The most fun aspect is working with other talented and passionate artists and creatives. I wouldn’t trade that aspect for the world as my best friends are all artists from current or past studios.”
GOE: What is your aspiration, where do you want to ‘settle down’?
“Well, my husband is a programmer, so we can (and try to) make small games on our own. It’s hard to plan and do that around full time jobs (he works at CCP on Eve Online), but we really want to make it work. We also run a guesthouse that I renovated for tourists to Iceland, and I really love entertaining people in small settings, not just in a faceless masses way that games allows me to.”
GOE: You’re also a photographer? Do you use that in your work in games as well?
“Photography has taught me an immense amount about light, composition, and colors. I love how quick the feedback is on photography, because the camera does so much for you, so you don’t have to worry about perspective (being correct, of course you have to play with compression and how the field of view affects composition) lighting accuracy, or color rendering, you really get to play art director.”
GOE: Experience is what can get you a career in the games industry. Once you’re in, you can prove yourself. But how do you get the chance to prove yourself in the first place? Tell us about your first opportunity, how you got it, and how you worked from there to grow.
“My first job was incredibly lucky. I was applying for internships and an art director saw promise in my work, had a budget for a beginner, and hired me on. I really did work hard after, but looking back I’m not sure I would have taken the risk on myself, hah! I did have one good (at the time and experience level) character, and in the in-person interview showed him my work flow was clean and neat and that I understood processes. It’s really important to show you can be sat down and start contributing quickly.”
GOE: How long does it take you on average to create a character? Have you become faster at it throughout the years?
“Without a doubt faster. Now a 2k character with 256 map takes me about 2-3 days, and before it was a week at least. You also learn what parts to pay attention to, what is going to work with a skeleton and deformations, and what will show in the intended resolutions. Lots of speedups and shortcuts.”
GOE: So you’re, lets say, 9 years old and you’re doodling some figures in your notebook. How do you get from that point to being a talented artist? How do you realize that you have that talent? Or even more so, can you start out completely talentless and become a great artist?
“You know I was never actually an artist growing up. I doodled in grade school, but not in high school. My first art was for the entrance exam to university. I am not that great of a 2D artist with drawing, all my practice has gone into material rendering and small volumes, and I sculpt my proportions and anatomy with lots of reference. It’s hard to decide if I subscribe in the nature vs nurture debate with what we consider talent, but so far in all my experience, I’ve been able to identify the really skilled people early. Their stuff has that sparkle, while still being wrapped in amateur mistakes. I can’t say that I’ve seen too many people go from truly awful to skilled, no matter the amount of practice, though I’ve seen a few go from awful to acceptable.”
GOE: What kind of project do you enjoy working on the most? What kind of project do you still dream of working on some day?
“I’d love to do games that put the focus on fun and user interaction instead of ramping art production higher and higher. There are games now where each character takes 2-3 man months to finish, but they are no more memorable or interesting than the good pixel characters of yesterday. I love making 3d art, but if the level designers, and game designers aren’t there backing it up with equally skilled design, it’s really frustrating.
I worked on a game I won’t specify, where the art, sound, and render engine was consistently given 9-10s in reviews, but design got 4-5s, and it was ultra frustrating to know me and my teammates did our job well, and we were let down by the people with more power within the company and higher salaries (ostensibly to justify this higher responsibility) who just didn’t know what they were doing.”
GOE: You were a level artist at Blue Byte. What does a level artist do exactly?
“At the time, I had to learn the proprietary editor, and simultaneously make it fun to play, make sure the technical parts worked, and art it out so it looked like a living landscape. I blocked it in with rough heights, painted in the IDs so the engine knew where borders were, added the required base buildings, and then it was started to be played by testers to make sure distances weren’t too far, that there was enough room to build, etc. I had to incorporate that feedback, sculpt the height to look more natural, paint using level texture brushes to establish what was forest vs grass, place environment art pieces (some of which I’d made previously) and integrate the gameplay with aesthetics. It was new and fun, and while it used a lot of my painting skills, the gameplay part was totally new for me.”
GOE: Being an artist is a creative profession. Of course, an ‘artist’s block’ can be as common as a writer’s block. Where do you get your inspiration from, and what do you do when you’re blocked?
“I want to leave you with a quote from Chuck Close. I actually feel this way exactly and just couldn’t phrase it well, and the first time I read this quote I knew I had it to give to others in a succinct way:
The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.
Founder of Game Thingie (gamethingie.com), she currently works as a game journalist to learn about the industry and get into game development after attaining her MscBA.