Learn the ART of Video Games

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Updated March 2020.

I have added a new section added to include Substance Alchemist (SA), the replacement for B2M. I have not removed the B2M lectures, they are still there if you wish to learn it as well as SA. I have also included many tweaks and updates in various parts of this ever growing course, which now sits at 44 hours of invaluable content. Enjoy.

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Creating environment art for video games can be a technical endeavor, but at its core, it's an art form. Simply pulling assets from an online store, and dropping them into an off the shelf game engine isn't enough in today's competitive industry. You need fundamental art skills, and if you want to stand out from the crowd... you need to create your own art and present your skills.

With 30 years of game development experience in an art and design capacity, I will show you, from an artist's perspective, how to create your own game ready 3D scene from scratch, as if you were working in an industry studio. You will start literally from  a blank page, go through art fundamentals and the whole asset creation process, and use that knowledge to construct a visually stunning 3D game environment presented in Unity. You will create every asset yourself. You will not be using library assets.

Creating art is at the heart of this course, but creating visuals is not just about the art, it's also about the ideas and the design that spawn the art. You will start at the beginning, at the design phase, and learn how to extract art related information from a game design document and create a map for your scene.

• Create an art brief for your own project.
  

• Create a Map / Level design.

To create stunning concept art, you need a firm understanding of art fundamentals. 

• The Horizon Line

• 1, 2 and 3 point perspective

• Light, shadow and value
  

• Color

I will then take you through the process of creating concept art, and show you techniques you can use to create quick speed paintings based on the fundamentals you have learned.

• Create Concept art from scratch

You will break down the visual brief and the concept art into assets and create a plan to build them yourself to a professional standard. With that behind you, you will move into the biggest part of the course, building your scene.

• Learn to use 3DS Max and Substance Painter.

• If you're a beginner, I will teach you how to use 3DS Max, an industry standard modelling package. If you're intermediate and you know how to use it, you can skip this part. But once you've mastered the basics, you'll begin creating a white box environment based on the design and the concept in previous lectures. 
  

• Create white box environments using basic modelling techniques.

Finally we'll move into more advanced  modelling and UV mapping techniques, and build ALL the components for our scene, using our white box as a guide. We'll create PBR textures in Substance Painter; export everything from 3DS Max, and drop it into Unity where we'll build the scene using the assets you have created.

• Create detailed, final assets

• UV Map

• Create textures in Substance Painter

• Build and light the scene in Unity

This course is perfect for anybody seriously wishing to pursue a career as an environment artist in the games industry and would like to experience the process and pipeline from scratch.

It's suitable for beginners to Intermediate levels.The more advanced artists may find that you're going over old ground in some areas, but it can still be a worthy refresher course. Over time, the course will get regular updates and keep on trend with industry techniques and standards. New content will also be added in the future.

This IS NOT an animation course and it IS NOT a character modelling course. Both of those are very specific disciplines within the game industry, and here, we are primarily focusing on highly detailed, quality, environment creation.