Hello and welcome. My name is Trent Kaniuga. I've been a professional concept artist working in the
video game industry for almost 20 years. I've worked on some pretty popular titles you've
probably heard of and I want to talk to you today about being a professional concept artist because
maybe you like to draw. Maybe you like to do a lot of doodles you've seen maybe awesome artwork
on Art Station, maybe you're pretty good artist and you've thought to yourself, "well, hey, I
can take a stab at that. I could give it a shot". So, you sit down and you do an awesome painting,
something that the best work you could do. You put that in a portfolio and you send that off to a
potential employer and you hear crickets. You don't hear anything back.
Well, you know, even if your artwork is really good, there might be a lot of things
that you're missing that are not in there. I run an art house also
and we do a lot of hiring from time to time and I get submissions from
a lot of different artists with no concept art in their portfolio at all and so getting
that first step of even understanding how to make usable applicable concept art for your portfolio
is a huge step. How do you get experience if you can't get your foot in the door?
Even if you're a really good painter or really good illustrator, you might not know what needs
to be in your portfolio to get a job working in the video game industry. So, to help out all
those artists out there who are trying to get their foot in the door into the game industry,
I've created a workshop. We're delivering it over on the new Proko site. Got a brand-new
Proko website and look at that, it's so shine. I'm unleashing the kraken here.
I'm going to release all the secrets of environment concept art development in
this workshop. This is about 3 and 1/2 hours long. What you're watching in the background is a time
lapse of this exact workshop and you might be thinking, "oh man, that ain't nothing. I could
paint more beautiful pieces than anything that Trent can do. Why am I not getting his job?" Well,
I'll tell you what, man... It's one thing to know how to paint a beautiful
landscape. It's something totally entirely different to design a modular system that
modelers can build multiple iterations of different types of structures out of
utilizing concept art that you've designed just the parts for but communicate it effectively
enough that they can extrapolate on that design to build a lot more structures just like it.
Also, all of this happens so rapidly. You really don't get more than a couple
of days to work on any one environment usually and if you're thinking "dude,
I don't even know what the heck you're talking about". Well, I'll tell you what,
man, maybe you're not ready yet but we can fix that. I can help you with that.
So, here are a few questions that you can ask yourself if you're wondering if maybe I am
ready and if you're not, then maybe these are questions you haven't considered yet.
Uh, for instance, what you're watching me do in the background of this video by the way
is a complete environment concept with call outs and if you're watching this and you're
thinking that I spent a month on it or two months on it, you'd be dead wrong.
I cannot afford in my of work and I've been doing this for 17 years by the way, I cannot in my line
of work spend more than a day or a day and a half on any one illustration or painting
and that includes call outs with little breakdowns of what those designs of - for instance those
pipes. What do they look like close up? Those alarm buttons. What are those look like close up?
You have to be able to create that type of content, that level of detail of content within
a very short period of time and it has to be functional usable content that a modeler can build
from. Before you even apply for a job as a concept artist you need to understand what the process is
like, what the actual pipeline is like and a lot of people have been asking me this recently - what
is that pipeline all about? like "how do you get your tasks? what is it look like when they give
you a task? Do they give you geometry? Do they give you a sense of the location and the space?
How much of the story is included in the task that they give you and how much of it do you have
to come up with? What kind of direction can you expect from the game director or the art director?
You know, what kind of camera angle should you choose for your concept or illustration? What's
the difference between a mood shot and a high concept illustration and conceptual breakdowns,
blueprints, and orthographics and how necessary are those orthographics? How necessary should
they be in your portfolio in your presentation? How much time do you get to do each one of these
iterations? What is an iteration and why am I even doing iterations? Why am I doing these
explorations? Where are these ideas going to come from and how do I stay on target,
on track for what's going to be effective, usable concept art for the rest of my team?
How do I block out objects into this 3D space very quickly? How much lighting is necessary
for my scene in order to communicate the mood and atmosphere of the desired outcome and how
do I stay on track for what the game designer is expecting me to deliver? How do I make effective
concept art that's going to assist the modelers and bridge that gap between the design team
and the modelers and the environment artists and meet the expectations of the end user, the players
who are going to play this game as well as my managers at the game studio that I'm working?
Because even if you get that job, are you going to know what questions to ask the designer in
order to make effective concept art or are you going to spend a month on a drawing and then
they're going to go, "dude, we've got this other guy who's right out of school who's giving us
10 or 20 different sketches a week. Are you an idea factory? Can somebody just say to you, "hey,
design this pillar and give me 50 pillars". And are you going to know what questions to
ask him to make sure that those 50 pillars are usable for that game that you're working on?
Are you going to know where to pull up information to be able to construct
believable pillars that fit within those criteria? Are you going to be
able to accept feed and how do you keep track of all the feedback that the clients giving you
and all that stuff just must seem so overwhelming. It must seem very intimidating and it's far too
much information to consolidate into one - I don't know, 10 minute YouTube video or something.
And so, nobody really talks much about that internal process and that's why I've
set aside some time... I've been working hard on this for a while guys this is
almost a three hour workshop. This is the stylized facility concept design workshop and going to get
the gray boxes that I painted over so you can go along with me.
This isn't just a time lapse video of me just droning on. I answer a lot of the questions in
this video and I give you as much insight as I can from my 17 years of experience of working at
Capcom and Blizzard and Riot and Sony and all the different companies that I do contract art for the
games that I work on and why we're consistently employed, why we're consistently hired. These
are the same things that I go through with my concept art team on every project that we work on.
This is a deep dive and nothing is hidden. The videos are almost real time but there is some
time lapse but it's pretty much real time. Nothing is hidden. I wanted to show you how the sausage is
made and all of it. I mean, this is a full sausage exposure. In this workshop, I invite you to draw
along with me to create your own facility using the same gray boxes and templates that I use.
This specific tutorial series has helped so many different artists
actually land jobs at Game Industry Studios, okay? I've received countless letters from
people saying this changed everything for them and that is exactly what I set out to do, okay?
Dudes, like, this is why I started my YouTube channel. I wanted to show
exactly how games are made. I wanted to show the truth about what concept art for video
games is actually like on a day-to-day basis because there's so many people who want to get
into this industry. They don't know how and nobody's talking about the actual process.
Meanwhile, there's a shortage of qualified concept artists and a lot of my friends that have studios,
they can't find talent. A lot of game studios can't find people who want to do the actual
work. So, let me help you, let me help them, let me help everybody come together. We're bringing
this whole synchronicity together to help you find that job working in the video game industry. So,
I want to thank Proko for letting me pull on your coat a little bit here and I certainly
hope to see you guys in the workshop. Alright, until next time. Ciao baby.