u/Spamtasticular

When you reach the point of needing an artist, bring as much reference as you can.
This means:

• Concept art: paid a concept artist for concepts, or gather a bunch of images in the style you want. A set of images for the character and another set for environments. This is to minimalize guessing on the artist side and reduce the amount of time it takes to make a model. The clearer the concept, the faster the modeling/texturing will go. It is better if you provide the images and not just say 'Jet Set Radio' style.
• Animation: get some youtube videos or gifs, etc. in the style of animation you want. Give notes of certain things you'd like to see in the animation. Walk cycles and jumping are part of the character's personality, so you need to help the animation understand what your character's world and motivations are. Make sure you are asking for cycles (walk cycle, jump cycle, crawl cycle, etc., this just means "reusable" animations)
• Timeline for creating characters/environments, To be safe, I'd say anywhere from 2-4 weeks for the first pass. Then an extra 2-5 days for revisions. During the first pass, I'd ask for updates like block outs or just a screenshot of the WIP to make sure work is actually being done. Keep the updates to once a week or every 3 days. Too often it feels like we're being micromanaged. This helps weed out less experienced or bad artists.
• If you don't need facial animation. Character rigging is pretty straight forward. 1 week is usually enough for a simple bipedal humanoid. A simple character rig can be pretty universal as long as the majority of the characters are in the same style as your protagonist (bipedal humanoid for example) If the bones and limbs move in the same manner as your main character, then the rig is reusable.

Now the tough part. How much will this cost? Well this is always a bit of a gamble and for the most part, you get what you pay for. You also need to determine what your budget is and assess any wiggle room you can provide to that budget. An experienced competent artist vs a junior artist/hobbyist with little-to-no studio experience are going to charge very differently.

• Ask for portfolios and work history, have they ever worked for/in a studio
• Ask if they have experience freelancing, working alone with minimal guidance
• Present your concept/idea and ask how long they think it would take to complete a first pass

In the end, it will come down to you on who you pick to be your artist. Paid art tests can be a way to filter out who is fit for the role. Where they're located may also influence the amount they ask for so I can't really give you a universal rate for a good artist. Do your due diligence when selecting an artist. They should be communicative and respond in a reasonable timeframe with details and progress reports. If you ask questions and you receive minimal worded/1 sentence responses, that's usually a sign that you're not going to like the deliverables. $70k/yr is pretty good for a start up project, but an arbitrary amount until we know more details about the world and characters you are trying to build. If you're asking for AAA quality work, you'll burn though that budget real fast. If you're looking for mobile quality, could enough to fund the whole project. Keep the scope small and reasonable for a vertical slice to determine how much it will cost to make a whole game out of it.

Yup, that is pretty much it. You can absolutely self learn without spending anything and get to a professional level, but chances are it will take 5x longer than if you took a course. It kind of comes down to, you don't know what you need to know if you don't know what you need. A structured program is designed to give you the crucial information in an efficiently contained manner vs looking up tutorials and chatting up forums for processes you don't even know the terminology for.

As you stated, the more important part is having access to someone who is actively in the field you are trying to get into ensures your education is up-to-date and studio relevant. Another advantage to having a mentor is that they're able to knock out any bad habits you may build along the way while studying.

I will preface my comment that I am currently an on campus instructor/mentor at the school. My words are of my own opinion and do not represent the school.

I believe the school offers top quality education, but like any school, it is also critical that the student puts in the effort to learn too. All instructors on campus or online are hired pretty much as a freelancer. We work full-time in the industry and teach/mentor for the school as a side gig. This is because the owners of Think Tank only want people that are currently active in the industry and have up-to-date knowledge of the software, pipeline, workflows that the industry uses.

I also listen to feedback of the on campus students when I'm there. I try to improve my lessons each term with the feedback I receive or with things I notice during my sessions. The school is constantly evolving and adjusting to make sure we're teaching relevant and useful information. I can't say for certain that their programs will be a hit or miss, because everyone learns at different speeds or respond differently to a lesson plan. The course may be effective to 9/10 students, but that 1/10 may not like the method the course is offering and may not get what they wanted for the price tag. Realistically, it is not possible to create a course that will be 100% effective for all. You have to be willing to put in the effort to do research on your own too if your mentor is not available to answer questions. Remember, we work full-time too so we aren't on-call 24/7.

The quality you see from the showcase on Think Tank's site is not only a selected few that are the top-of-the-top from the school term. It is actually the standard that most of the students leave the course with. The students, which are the majority of them, achieve this quality because they grinding their efforts to ensure they aren't lagging behind their classmates and are actually industry level ready when it comes time for the job hunt.

I hope that helps you a bit with your decision.

Sent a DM

The purple and orange linework makes it kind of hard to tell what I'm looking at. The high contrast between the linework and the black rock shapes makes the model look really noisy detail wise. Some gradients on the rock forms would help the transition between the bright lines. The silhouette is also kind of lacking too. If this model didn't have hands, I wouldn't be able to tell I was looking at some kind of creature.

Character sheet or character design sheet

Interested. Will DM when I'm off work. Just want to comment here so I don't lose this post.

A 3D reel needs to show your best work with breakdowns. You give like maybe 2 seconds to look at something before cutting away to another piece. No time to assess the quality of the 3D models, no breakdowns to show you understand the technical side of a 3D pipeline.

Your videos reads more like a motion graphics artist. For a 3D reel there is no good reason to time your cuts to music. Most leads mute audio because we don't really care what your music choice is, we're looking for quality 3D art.

It's nicely put together and reads like an advertisement, but not great for 3D since you are posting here. Without digging into your profile or history, I have no idea what you're trying to show, or what the video's goal is.

Are you using this to find work or just showing what you've done recently?

Sorry to be this guy...but I have a small gripe with your texture. Each color should have the same number of tiles. If you're doing this texture via Substance Designer, you could just feed each color into 1 tile generator node so that each color will always have the same amount of tiles no matter how big the grid is.

The design looks cool. I think it could really use a greebling pass on the textures to help sell the size of it. Right now, the lack of details makes the ship look tiny. You need smaller fine details that you would see on actual ships. If you remove the backgrounds and just have this floating in a void, it reads really small. Almost like it is a handheld device.

For some great examples, look at the space ships from Star Wars, Star Trek, War Hammer, Halo. They're packed with details. The smaller the details you add, the bigger the ship will look. The entire ship doesn't need to be covered in details, but the small details give a better sense of scale to the overall picture. Another thing that would be nice to see is the name of the ship somewhere. If the game is based around humans, we put the names of the ship somewhere visible and large so it can be identified at a distance.

All the best in your studies and career building. Feel free to DM me anytime you need advice or feedback. I am pretty well experienced in the field and also a part-time instructor/mentor for 3D artists.

Hey,

Glad you're doing well and submitted your character. Moving is always a stressful event. For a beginner the character is okay, but definitely beyond your current skills. Your concept was way too difficult for someone just starting to learn 3D. As far as 3D studies go, what is your next step or big assignment going forward?

Going by your image, I think you need to step back and do some basics if you plan doing characters. If you want to get really good at characters you'll need to do more sculpting to understand human anatomy better. Head sculpts, torso sculpts, limbs, and speed sculpts. If you are good at anatomy in 2D, it helps with the foundations, but translating it to 3D is the true challenge.

If you cant afford ZBrush, which is the industry standard, go with Blender. It's free and can do basic sculpting. Not as powerful as zbrush, but it is good enough for students and getting yourself use to sculpting. If you an Autodesk license through your school as a student, try Mudbox. It is pretty powerful, but still not as good as Zbrush.

I am a 3D artist and here is my take on this. Most freelance artists I've worked with and as a freelancer myself, we charge by the hour. If I'm dealing with solo or <5 people developers, we negotiate the rate and maximum hours I am allowed to work per week. This keeps everyone's expectations in check.

There things you can do on your side to make sure the artist is being efficient:

• Ensuring your art style is defined with plenty of reference material. Knowing what you want makes it easier for us to give it to you. If you're not sure of what you want, you give us free reign to try out whatever and easily run up your invoice.
• If you don't have enough reference or are unsure of the style you want, talk with your artist to decide this. We don't like the unknown as much as you. It makes our job harder and satisfying the client harder.
• Ask for updates or screenshots of progress if you unsure about your artist. It kind of annoys us if this happens too often, but we get it, you are spending money on the expectation of results.
• If you charge X amount per asset, this could easily lead to poor quality being submitted to you. If I work with someone that constantly wants changes, that $40 tuft of grass could cost me way more in work hours because the client isn't satisfied and can demand unlimited changes. This could also bleed into the work hours of other assets.
• Keep communications with your artist consistent and professional. Sometimes you spend money on art and you don't like the result. It is okay to fire your artist and look for a new one. Sometimes you have to eat the cost of receiving work you don't like. This is why communicating with your artist regularly is important, to make sure goals are aligned and expectations are met.

I've worked in studios as the lead directing the in-house team as well as freelancers, I've worked as a freelancer for studios, and I've worked as freelancer for solo-devs. There is a lot to learn about working with artists and understanding the quirks of a pipeline/workflow. Frustrations are not just on your end because you're paying the bills. If the artist is working blind (poor reference or concepts), no clear style, or no clear directions, it makes the experience bad for everyone involved.

I'd say you are more of a technical-animator or slightly leaning into tech-artist. Your portfolio is lacking on the art side of things. It still reads at a jr. level. To be a generalist you'll need more polished art (characters, environments, props). Your animations are pretty smooth, but the poses are quite weak. Overall, the porfolio is very mid-level, not quite senior level.

Okay, going off your situation, I'm going to give you advice that will hopefully improve your situation in Japan. You are probably more eager to learn 3D than your peers, so that is going to be the easy part. You're biggest disadvantage is going to be language and mannerisms. The language is what makes internships hard for foreigners. Japanese companies will always lean towards a native speaker as it is less hassle to them, even if you are the better talent. By mannerisms, I mean how well have you adapted to Japanese culture? If your goal is to join the Japanese work force, start acting like one of them. You can have your own personality, but the closer you resemble a native born, the easier your life will be there.

As for the 3D side of things:

• If the school is teaching environment art only, then just follow the lesson plan. You are only making it harder on yourself by trying to do something they dont teach. You can always learn characters on your own but this advice is to make your life easier at school.
• If you want power through this with characters, start simple. Even if you come from a fine arts background, 3D is its own beast, you just have a better foundation. I'm guessing the course work is probably easy so the expectations are low. Your deadline is too tight to attempt something so fancy as your example. Think mobile game quality to start. Your goal here is not to impress yourself, it is to show you can finish an assignment. Your school cares more about you hitting a deadline than showing off how good at art you are. Honestly, in a studio this is pretty important too. Don't think yourself above making mobile game art, they have their fun challenges too and you will learn quite a bit about the technical side of things doing it.
• You said you are limited to lab time only to use Zbrush and have begun learning Blender for sculpting. In my honest opinion, If you are on a tight deadline and need to hand in an assignment or fail, forget sculpting (for now). Focus on the deadline. Maya is industry standard, focus on that. When I first started doing characters at work, 90% of it was pure modeling because Zbrush wasn't standard in the industry yet. If I work on a mobile game character, a generic NPC would probably take me a week to make it game ready. Since you're learning, I would give you a 2-3 weeks. The main point here, it is a doable goal and won't mentally fry your brain. You have to learn in stages.
• Whether you do environments are characters, they have overlapping steps, like UV unwrapping, clean topology, texturing in whatever software (probably Substance Designer/Painter) and then final render, either using Maya-Arnold or in a game engine like Unreal. Modeling is only 1 part of the process, so don't spend too long trying to make it look perfect. You have to balance your time out with the rest of the pipeline. Make a physical list of what steps you need to do finish your work, like in a notepad...or use notepad on your computer. This list will help you keep you on track so you don't dive too deep into 1 aspect of the assignment. For example: Find concept, blockout, modeling, UV unwrap and packing, texturing, lighting, rendering, revisions, final output.

Since I've experienced your struggle first hand, I know your pain all to well. Start simple, the school has low expectations, don't burn yourself out by trying to learn it all in such a short time. AND because you are new to all these software, you need to focus on a simple assignment first, you have to get familiar with each software first so you can build muscle memory to move faster and more efficiently.

So a quick recap:

1. If the assignment is an environment, make an environment. Don't make schoolwork harder on yourself. You will still learn fundamental skills that will help you on the road to character art.
2. If you are dead-set on making a character, start simple, a mobile or anime level character. Something 3-5k polycount, 2048 texture, rendered in Maya probably using Arnold.
3. To get that internship, master your Japanese (keigo!). Copy their mannerisms, act like Japanese. Assimilate (I dont like this, but it is the road to success)
4. Keep studying and improving on your own. You are in a foreign country, so you have to work harder to prove your worth. Expectations of you are lower and that is good, because it means your hard work will be even more impressive when you outshine your peers.

I have some experience with what you're going through. Unfortunately you're probably not going to like what I have to say. It might be different for you, or it could be a reality check that you need. I had a similar dream many years ago. I wanted to learn 3D to one day work on a FF game. Japan seemed like the obvious decision. I enrolled at Digital Hollywood in Tokyo. Little did I know, Japan's higher education system is a joke and incredibly biased against foreigners (obvious right? The country is still pretty xenophobic despite it desperately needs foreigners to keep the country running) .

Here are some things I want you to check with your situation:

• How attentive are your instructors to your needs? Do they answers your questions outside of the general lesson? Mine weren't. They would give a 20min lesson from a laughably basic textbook they wrote and you had to buy in order to proceed with the course. Once they finished talking, they would not answer questions or just disappear for the rest of the class. (Some of these classes were 3 hours). The only questions they would put a bit of effort into were for their potential star pupil.
• Did you ask for more resources or advice from your instructors/school board? Did they give you anything useful or just tell you to follow the course?
• Are you increasingly using YouTube and other sites to answer your questions? Are you spending more time looking for tutorials than doing the course work? Almost all my foreigner classmates were watching YT when the teacher stopped talking. Anyone seriously looking for an education was desperate to learn more.
• Check to see how many foreign students remain after the first year. Check how many remain the year after that (if your schooling is longer than 2 years). The number is pretty much halved each year. This goes for all vocational/universities in Japan. Waseda is no execption. Many of us get pulled in by fancy facilities and their inflated brochures. Any real data on the school's education quality or percentage of grads that find work is not available. Leaving bad reviews can lead to legal troubles in Japan, so most do it after they go back home to their own country.
• Talk to your seniors. Ask them if they can answer your "technical" questions. Things an entry level artist should know, like topology, texel density, polycount, texture sizes, udims. If they are struggling to answer your questions, you are going to be them next semester. Ask when they will start looking for internships. (does it seem too early for them to be seeking an internship?) Internships are the real education system in Japan. It is also the most likely method of how one gets hired after graduation.

If my points feel a little too close to your own experience, then I'm sorry, you fell for their money trap and you are starting to realize it. Personally, I would look for schools back home or other countries that actually show student reels and not just the school's highlight reel. Email the schools and ask whatever you need you think would help you build a successful career. If you are under 25 (for some countries it is 30) you can always go back to Japan under the working holiday visa. I would never want to experience their work culture ever again. Also their shit wages, but to each their own.

DM sent.

Is this your reference? They're great illustration, but not great for 3D art. These kind of illustrations are generally considered a 1st approval pass. As in the idea is good enough that it gets approved, next step would be a version with better defined details and a turnaround. There is too much interpretation by the 3D artist to be done.

Those illustrations also back my notes about proportions. Even though they're heavily stylized, you see where anatomy is being pushed and balanced.

The proportions are just so off. Stylized characters are tricky because you are attempting to exaggerate specific body parts and proportions, but the body still needs to look functional.

For me these don't work:

• Traps are enormous, fighting for screen space against the arms. Poor guy doesn't have enough chest or lats to hold up all that mass.
• Arm proportions....your choice in where you scaled things is interesting. When the wrist is thicker than the bicep, it becomes way harder to sell believability, because again, you need to support the mass with other details. Like if he was shredded with muscles then it would be more believable, but he is like ultra lean, any kind of breeze would topple him.
• Torso and legs, just the same issue, the arms and neck throw off the proportions so much that these look like they are for a different model. This could probably be saved by making the chest wider and making the lats massive. His tiny frame could not swing those arms.
• And finally, his glutes...why is he perma-flexing his butt. Relax.

Revisit your reference. Or find better reference? Superman would probably be my first choice. Lots of him in various styles that would be close to what you're trying to do. Mr. Incredible or Metroman also come to mind. Prime Arnold Schwarzenegger would be good too.

DM sent

DM sent.

DM sent.

I'm not trying to troll you or be mean. The anatomy is quite off, the most obvious places are the arms and hip-waist. It also looks like you started sculpting at a really high resolution so everything is quite lumpy when it shouldn't be. I don't think this was intentional, but you've sculpted barrel-gut which could be an issue with your reference.

If you're not sure where the muscles are connect and overlap and are doing the sculpt from a bunch of photo references, try to make sure your references are roughly the same person/build type. It looks like you mixed and matched 5 different body types into 1.

The anatomy and proportions are all over the place.