Hello! This is my first post on PC. I'm a student at Gnomon and graduating in December. I want to work as an environment artist in games, and I'm dedicating my last bit of time (5 months now?) towards that. I have nothing but "demo reel" and "portfolio building" classes now so... it's up to me to just create what I want.

I started a blog recently too: http://joy-lea.blogspot.com/ if you want to see kind of what I've done so far in school. Mostly hi-poly modeling/texturing for stills, no game stuff yet. I've also done some freelance modeling and I'm interning at the school's studio making assets for the next short.

So uhh... mostly what I've been struggling with is figuring out exactly what I should make. I want to make assets, and show them in Unreal (I have a just enough experience in this to know how to import in a model from Maya). Should I do a bunch of different assets? Should I shoot for an entire cohesive environment? I guess that's mostly what I see from other people here haha but level design isn't a strong point of mine.

The other night I made a couple things just to make something, kind of sketched a couple things out and built them hi-poly. I had this idea in my head of a hi-techie Pokemon Center.





Big chunky shapes! I wanted to keep the proportions kind of close to what they had in the games. I don't really design stuff often; mostly at Gnomon we're tasked to match concepts. It's also different for me to think of making things that can/have to repeat... haha.

As my time gets shorter and shorter I have to make the right decisions. I do have like 50hrs a week that I can dedicate to this stuff, and I work pretty fast, so I have the time potential to do a LOT. I would appreciate any kind of criticisms or advice that you can give me, towards this project or even for future projects I should do.

Thanks so much!

Based on what you've shown here and what you have on your website, you've definitely got a great handle on high poly modeling. I'm eager to see some of your stuff baked to low poly meshes, textured, and running in Unreal

Personally I wouldn't just do a bunch of random assets, I would decide on a small scene that contains a bunch of assets so that when you're finished with them you can showcase everything in a small cohesive scene. If you're having trouble coming up with something you want to work on, just spend some time looking at tons of concept art and see if something catches your eye, and then do your best to recreate it in 3d.

It depends on what your goals are.

If you want to be an environment artist, do environments.

A quality, complete and cohesive environment is always more impressive than a bunch of random individual assets. It shows you've got the skills to not just make cool props, but that you can construct a scene (it doesn't have to be huge) and put all the pieces together and have it all running in a game engine.

Spend some time, look around for a good concept that you can work off of. Start your planning and go art shit up.

what I would recommend is creating a full environment from different concepts or a game you like. Or you could pick a concept from a studio you may want work for. Also if your still new to UDK check out http://www.3dmotive.com/ or check out the UDK wiki here on PC.