Why do texture artists always get shafted?

    What is it with the world and texture artists?

    Pixar releases a new film - the animators get to tour the world, basking in the spotlight. When you ask who did the shader work, you kinda get the feeling that they are not even located on the same campus as the rest of the crew.

    There are millions of dedicated tools, forums, books, magazines and what not for animators. Modellers have quite a few as well. The grape wine has it that the top dogs, earnings wise, are the character animators, with the texture artists at the bottom, in your regular games company. And the beat goes on...

    As far as I know, the devil is in the details, and nobody holds a tighter grip on them, than the texturers! We control the look and feel of the visuals more than any other function.

    We hold the power and it is time we stood up, put our foot down and made the world realize and submit to that power!

    Texture artists of the world, UNITE!!!

    I mean, why isn't there a dedicated place for texture artists? I would love nothing more than sitting and discussing everything from tilable environment textures and alpha mapped decals to specularity maps for characters and plugins for unwrapping, the entire day long. Am I the only one who burns for texture work to the exclusion of most anything else(okay that's not entirely true)?

    More credit would be nice but its one of the phenomens in the cg industry. be it games or movies. It's like even though we do a HUGE chunk of all the art in a game/movie, we are still looked down upon as "the guys that make concrete walls" ... if you catch my drift.

    I guess it's just not one of the most respected positions ever. But I dont care as long as its fun and well paid

    That does it, dammit , I am gonna make a texture world, so big they can not ignore us anymore! We are gonna have texture world championships, texturing groupies, texturing magazines, texturing tv shows, texturing schools, texturing CDs, texturing DVDs, texturing LPs, texturing gurus, texturing hall of fame and a texturing government to lord it over all of the animators out there, who thinks that just because an unnatural movement can be spotted miles away, then that is not also the same for a tiling pattern or a hard edge in a surface. DAMMIT!

    And there will be outright death penalty for even just hinting, that texturing is just 2D, hence not as respectable as other 3D work!

    I am dead serious. Watch this space!

    - this has been a texturing public message -

    Yeah you hear more about the other peoples, people think that the mappers do all the nice level art etc. but hell a map without textures wouldn't be worth SHIT.

    But no one gets that.

    Personally I love to texture stuff, atleast way more than I like to map for Source.

    I have always tought that the description "animator" was used in the film idustry to generally describe the people who work on the animations, hence the word animator, like people who act are actors, and people who write are called writers.

    Like puppeteers back in the day, they were called puppeteers but in fact they often made their own puppets and even controlled them. So I believe that these so called "animators" job range from making textures to shaders to models and ofcourse the animation.

    So I wouldn't take it too seriously, the name animator is used because it is WAY too complicated to start using accurate descriptive names for people, like if you post a "modeller" on big bold letters on some magazine cover, people are either instantly thinking about models (like those people who put on clothes and walk on the catwalk) or they just don't see their connection to any kind of animation. I mean, heck, the people who do those disney cartoons are called animators and all they do is draw hundreds of stills, or paint backgrounds.

    So don't be offended by the name, it comes with the job, like construction worker even if all he does is supervises the work.

    Quote from marque_pierre

    Kosmo, it is not the name here. See beyond that. :arrow: Look at what Klein is saying...

    I just tried to illustrate a point, many game story writers think that they deserve to be looked equal to movie writers, becaseu of the complexity of their work, but usually they get caught on the naming "game developer".

    But how is it that you don't see that you are as full of yourself as those "infamous" animators are, "As far as I know, the devil is in the details, and nobody holds a tighter grip on them, than the texturers! We control the look and feel of the visuals more than any other function." oh come on, that is the biggest load of bull I have ever heard, not one single aspect of game art is over the other, fuck, do you think that doom 1&2 are the best games ever, since 90% of the art was all textures?

    Now I agree, the other aspects of cg has been overlooked at times, and todays hot thing seems to be the people who do the shader work, the lighting things and what not. And it shifts, back in the days of Quake 1 and Quake 2 the modellers seemed to get most of the glory on game art. Besides, if you look at the right companies you see alot of apreciation towards other forms of art, like Blizzard for example, they seem to held high their concept artists and they seem to keep pride to their original texture work, so I don't actually see what the problem here is.

    Ofcourse the more dedicated places for different areas of cg there is, the better it is for the whole industry, and you are absolutely right, we should have some sort of texture community that has it's own idols and communitaction to improve the quality. But alot of communities that I hang around, are really not that specific about their target democraphic, like CGtalk there seem to be people from all areas, and 3dtotal seems to be filled with skilled texture artist, and so on and so on.

    And as for Kleins comment on texturers being seen as the people who "do the concrete walls", I'm not so sure if that is the case, sure if you ask person who doesn't play passionately, they seem to think that way, but any person who is a dedicated gamer doesn't think that wall as "just a concrete wall", I have alot of friends who appreciate graphics in modern games, and they don't seem to keep other form of art in higher regard over other, but that is the way it is with everything, to me a car is just a piece of mechanical just no different from a toaster, but the engineer that designed the car helds his work most important in the world, something that can't be compared to mere toaster. But that is just how it works.

    Kosmo:

    Well, obviously my posts were a tad propagandistic, but you should be able to see through that, and there is also great truths to be found in the surreal, particularly for a jedi such as yourself. At any rate, if you think what I am saying is the biggest load of bull shit you have heard today, then you must have had an absolutely stellar day today, and besides you are of course entitled to your opinion.

    Do anybody else have any opinions and points of view relating to the original topic?

    The way I see it, some of the most respected people in the mod community are texture artists. The limited number of talented texture artists, at least in the HL1 mapping community (the time I was most active and involved), meant that those who put out quality stuff gained a lot of notoriety. Perhaps its not the same in the commercial industry, but I have a bucketload of respect for good texture artists. I'm sure those that have fond memories of playing around with Blazeer's sets, or evil_lair's, or ones they grabbed from shaderlab would be inclined to agree.

    Marque, if you do start up such a community I wish you the best of luck. There have been some in the past that could be described as going along with your vision, and wadfather is one of the ones that immediately comes to mind, but while it didn't have a great deal of community success, it did have a huge amount of popularity from people searching for textures or skies for their own levels. Changing the focus from a resource site to a community site could be a difficult task, but best of luck if you give it a shot

    Quote from st0lve

    Yeah you hear more about the other peoples, people think that the mappers do all the nice level art etc. but hell a map without textures wouldn't be worth SHIT.But no one gets that.

    That could be the biggest pile of garbage I have ever read (unless if you were being sarcastic).

    Every component of game design compliments each other. Naturally without one element or with a weak element, the system as a whole suffers.

    @ Kosmo: My whole point was that people misconcept us for what we do. Any by people I mean people who are not into game development, but the average joe type of guy. How many news articles have you read where the author tells us that 50 programmers are working their ass off on [game x] to make it the most visually impressive game ever seen? I read it all the time. Even when I tell people I do game development for a living I get questions like "Oh so you're a programmer?" or when I tell them "no i do game art" and i start explaining what i do they go "oh so youre like those guys who made toy story"

    at which point i just give up and nod.

    Misconception.

    While its a horrible simplicity of your job, I tend to just use the old "textures make a flat surface look like a brick wall by painting a picture on it" explanation and people tend to get the picture.

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