What is a game texture artist? The most basic answer to that is to say a texture artist’s job working for a game developer is to bring meshes created in 3D to life. The roles of a texture artist has expanded quite a bit in recent years since back in the early days of 3D graphics (Sony PlayStation 1 and Nintendo 64) texture artists were only really required to paint colours onto one single map which would wrap around a very simple 3Dmesh. The difference now is that meshes are far more complicated and require various other maps which in some cases require different tools from one another. I will provide a breakdown of how I generally work with regards to current technology.

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Before good ol’ GDC comes around again, we jumped the gun and interviewed Naughty Dog’s Lead Gameplay Animator Jeremy Lai-Yates about the recently released PlayStation 3 hit Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. When I first played the game, I just stared in awe while I watched lead character Nathan Drake get wet. Yeah, that sounds bad. But seriously, the engine is sophisticated enough to know exactly where Drake’s clothes get wet, and even better than that, they gradually dry over time once you jump out of the water. Stunning details like this are bending real-time in-game environment response to player actions.

Jeremy is one of the artists responsible for the life-like movements of characters in real-time play found in Uncharted. Forget sitting back to watch pretty cut scenes—now’s the time to enact them. And if you leave this interview wanting more, check out Jeremy’s talk with Lead Character Technical Director Judd Simantov—“Uncharted Animation: An In-depth Look at the Character Animation Workflow and Pipeline”—Wednesday, February 20 at the Game Developers Conference.

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In any other industry, it may be enough to say that you want to be an artist. But, in the games industry, that’s not quite enough; you’ll need to be lots more specific. In the games industry, there are artists, yes, but there are also modelers, texture artists, character animators, skins artists, 2-D artists, 3-D artists — and oh so many more.

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