Troy McCron

That's! my submission The Mad king Arthur for the @ArtStationHQ challenge done! I can finally sleep Big thanks to Michel Donze for the epic concept! More pics here: (link: bit.ly/2TcXEza) #gameart #3dart #artstation #characterart #polycount #ArtistOnTwitter #substance

@EZE3D I like the idea of paid trials. I know companies would absolutely scoff at the idea. But from a workers rights and a sustainability perspective this would absolutely be the most ethical way to hire creatives

Also I totally glossed over the paid trial bit, if art tests are paid that would be a huge incentive to push for them, but I doubt that would become standard.

Art tests should be a step 2 or 3 process if anything. You need resumes, portfolios and interviews to sort through applicants. Sometimes 100's or 1000's come in for 1 job, it would be a waste of everyone's time if they all did an art test. 1/2

@gerrysaltric @henningsanden Explain? This doesn't really have anything to do with the modules I teach. These kids have been radicalised into thinking that you exist to work, and your worth is entirely productivity-based. I discourage this, you only get your youth once, and you need to have a life.

@RobotNinjaToast @henningsanden Then your courses are pointless

New video youtu.be/O8jBR-ZDB5U

@henningsanden I think this lands differently when you work with young people every day. The students I worry about aren’t partying. They have no life outside their work. No hobbies, no identity beyond becoming employable. You say: “Grind hard.” They hear: “Your worth is your productivity.”

@henningsanden If every aspiring artist sacrifices relationships, hobbies and life in pursuit of employability, are we producing better artists? Or simply selecting for who can endure the conditions required to enter the industry? Those aren’t necessarily the same thing. x.com/RobotNinjaToas…

@Rmlambert_00 @thekittenmancer Thanks man 😊 that's the hope 🙏 hopeful I can make little meaningful changes and leave more of a positive impact than a negative one. Small wins are still wins

@RobotNinjaToast @thekittenmancer Exactly plus you have contructive criticism with your great sub stack article + You're a lecturer so you're raising the next generation of Game artists, there's a lot of leverage in your teaching! Because they can execute action even if you don't directly!

Discussing grind culture and the games industry on X. And unsurprisingly, 280 characters wasn’t enough, so I accidentally wrote an essay instead It’s about why I think we’ve started confusing self-sacrifice with professionalism. I hope people still read😅 open.substack.com/pub/troymccron…

@thekittenmancer @Rmlambert_00 Sometimes it takes a bit of back forward to realise you have common ground 😊

@Rmlambert_00 @RobotNinjaToast I don't see why you were arguing with me if we're in agreement

@Rmlambert_00 @thekittenmancer Be the change you want to see - that's how I tackle it. Complaining is fine; got to vent, constructive criticism is better. Actions are the gold gold standard

@thekittenmancer @RobotNinjaToast I'm saying currently what happens is complaining, that SOLVES little to nothing, the universe doesn't care about opinions only actions! I propose people brute force the change they want the same way I brute forced the life I want, hence I never complain about things on twitter!

@gee_oji Yeah, I mean I did that; that's not really what I was talking about in my essay. Passion projects are great - just I wouldn't do them for the sake of ‘employability’ or frame it as ‘productivity’ a term that increasingly gives me the ick

@RobotNinjaToast Except this isn’t grind culture. The best and “talented” kids in art schools have been doing this forever. They do extracurricular projects outside their coursework because they are curious and it’s fun and *it doesn’t feel like work”. People then interpret that as “talent”

When I say a AAA trailer can cost "about four months of development iteration time", I don't mean it LITERALLY takes four months to edit a video. I mean that's roughly how much disruption gets spread across the team. The first month is goddamn death by a thousand cuts. Producers and Directors need to figure out what the trailer is trying to say. Teams are pulled into meetings. Features get reprioritized. Artists, designers, engineers and QA all have to estimate what they can realistically contribute. Nobody stops working entirely, but everybody for sure loses some momentum. Then you can have a period of intense focus where parts of the team temporarily pivot away from buildin the core game. Artists gotta create bespoke assets. Engineers are hacking together functionality that only needs to work in a controlled environment. Designers have script moments that sell the fantasy that takes so much iteration to get right. QA has to maybe validate a slice of the game that may not represent the wider experience. Because you can't showcase something that looks well but doesn't play well, (and then you're stuck with bullshit that looked good in a trailer). For a month or two, a significant amount of creative energy gets redirected toward the trailer. BUT GUYS IT GETS EVEN MORE ANNOYING WHEN THE TRAILER SHIPS. The month after is often spent stitching all that shit back together again. Teams gotta resync, all the damn plans get rewritten. All those features built for the trailer get integrated, or re-scoped (or ABANDONED???). Feedback from execs, publisher, press, or the public might even create new priorities. Not ot mention people have to remember where they left off before the interruption. A whole bunch of people gotta take a couple days vacation after the trailer if they had to crunch for it. The trailer migtt only be three mintes long, but every AAA game development i worked on ran on momentum. It's not that everyone suddenly stops working for four months. It's that hundreds of people each lose little chunks of time, and eventually those chunks add up to months of development momentum disappearing into the fucking void. I'm trying to teach everyone how Game Dev works but it's too many words sometimes.

My PieMaster add-on for Blender has been updated to version 0.1.1! superhivemarket.com/creators/pitiw… pitiwazou-1.gumroad.com artstation.com/pitiwazou/stor… #piemaster #3d #b3d #blender #blender3d #3dart

@Alejandro947174 @TheCartelDel @aswordofsoap This happens all the time, and when it does, it can lead to really painful project derailing and a lot of extra work. Nothing worse than working with the sword of Damocles of a trailer hanging over your head

@TheCartelDel @aswordofsoap You are just making shit up at this point. You are talking like if the portion of the trailer is not in the game so they have to make it for the trailer only.

"why no NaUgHtY dOg tRaiLeR?" Because every time a AAA game studio has to move resources over to making a trailer, it causes the game to lose about 4 months of actual dedicated development iteration time. Look, do you want a new game or not?

@Rmlambert_00 @TheCartelDel This is really cool, man. I'm so glad graphics cards have become more powerful. My uni laptop was a 1050, and it crashed pretty consistently with MT3, and I couldn't even open Unreal 😂 I hope this picks up and we see more portfolios

@RobotNinjaToast @TheCartelDel Uni portfolio from 2014 that got me hired in Ubisoft Massive 6months out of Uni, There was more I just ran out of twitter space. The standard has moved for sure but so have resources and computing power, I did all this on a gtx780m laptop full SUBD modelling back then.

There's only something like 7-10,000 AAA artists in the US. And many of those people are not quitting anytime soon, so you have to wait for roles to open to replace one. Getting into the industry at a high level requires some mastery yet this post is upsetting folks. This is a hard truth. I genuinely wonder if he had said "you need to train way harder to be an orchestral musician on stage" if people would be less mad. Pro Artist making games is not some random job people. It's a highly specialized and sought after craft with limited places. Why is that offensive that it's competitive?

Here's something I've been quietly working on for months... it started as a personal tool but after seeing how much it actually helped me in practice, I refined it to fit any workflow so I could share it. Meet RadialZ youtu.be/CSrlpeuqYVk (coming this week!) #RadialZ #ZBrush

@dekaf @TheCartelDel We’ve had regular industry panels and reviews over the years. The consistent message is that expectations for junior portfolios have risen dramatically. I’m not saying graduates should know every pipeline. I’m saying we’re hiring for potential less and finished products more.

@RobotNinjaToast @TheCartelDel Production workflows differ per studio. Those come with learning on the job. What studio has told you they expect your students to know all of this out of school? Where is this notion that studios have shifted the cost onto students coming from?

Growing up in St Monans and then watching the trailers for this is a weird. Every few seconds I spot something that makes me think, “Hang on… I grew up there.” Very excited to play it. Slightly concerned that my childhood appears to have been repurposed as a Silent Hill level 😂

@MjTheHunter Being a nice person 😂 genuinely though soft skills, 90% of the job is team work and communication

My fellow gamedevs! What's a criminally underrated skill when making games?

@dekaf @TheCartelDel Fundamentals absolutely should be learned before employment. I’m talking more about production, pipelines, teamwork, feedback and studio workflows. I’ve seen juniors hired with portfolios that already look mid-level while capable junior portfolios get overlooked.

@RobotNinjaToast @TheCartelDel What do you consider 'training'? Training basic art skills, something you should or could have learnt in school is not the same as training software usage - which can be fairly fast.

@TheCartelDel That’s incredibly kind of you, thank you. A few graduates immediately came to mind and I’ll reach out to them next week. I think we’ve got different perspectives on some of this, but I genuinely respect that you’re willing to invest your time in the next generation of artists.

@RobotNinjaToast Then send their details to me. I will mentor them for free.

I believe my 2010 3D portfolio would be close for a current junior role. Yes, the barrier to entry has risen, but so has the resources. We never had YouTube tutorials or online classes as options. I never had a Character Art class at college. Everything was learned from forums and outdated books. A better question. How many graduates at least match the quality of my outdated portfolio from 16 years ago? No shade, I'm just opening up the conversation. Link: web.archive.org/web/2010092514…