[In the final installment of Game Career Guide's "Top Ten Tips" feature series, Robert Chang lists his top tips for industry artists.]
1. Never turn in work that has technical mistakes.
As a professional artist, your job is to give life to what exists only in the imagination, and other people rely on you to do this with a certain level of proficiency. When you turn in work that has obvious anatomy mistakes, incorrect perspective, or contradicting lighting, you are basically telling your co-workers that you are an incompetent artist.
Ideally, your work should contain as few technical mistakes as possible, and the only critiques you get from your peers and superiors should regard style and design, never your competence as an artist.
2. Never turn in sloppy work.
As an art director, I constantly see sloppy mistakes which are just inexcusable -- white halos around cropped images, jaggies around edges, stray pixels in alpha channels, reversed normals, double faces on a polygon, messed up UV, and plenty more.
As a professional production artist, you should be turning in work that is clean, up to spec, and ready to run in the game. Take that extra 10 minutes to check your art asset on a local copy of the game to make sure it works before officially checking it in on the server. Don't be the one who breaks the latest build with your sloppy art asset.
3. Always get approval between stages.
Often artists will work in the dark and only realize they've been going in the wrong direction when they resurface with a new batch of work.
The art director won't always have time to come and check on your progress, so you need to make sure you are getting approval during each agreed-upon stage.
4. Don't be needy.
The reverse is also true -- don't be insecure and needy. If your task is to do concepts for 10 different combat vehicles, don't go and bug the art director after you sketch each one.
Ask the AD at what stages he or she would like you to submit assets for review, and how many variations you should be creating.
5. Always save in iterations.
Often as we iterate and change a piece of art, we get further and further away from the original intent -- sometimes in a negative way.
Save in iterations and compare what you have to the earlier versions, and you might be surprised to find that you actually prefer an earlier version more. Saving in iterations means you can always retrace your steps and revert to an older version if necessary.
