What does an artist with an unquenchable thirst do to learn? Teach! Anthony Jones is a concept artist and the founder of Robotpencil, an online school for up-and-coming digital artists. In this interview, he tells us what he’s been working on, where he’s finding inspiration, and how he sees the big trends in 3D and virtual reality developing. Anthony also shares some of the important life lessons he’s learned about being laid off, filling his portfolio with passion projects, building a community, and even launching a Kickstarter campaign?the same lessons he shared with his students at Robotpencil.
LEVEL – Appropriate for all
COURSE TOPICS:
READ MORE
LEARN THIS COURSE FOR FREE *10 days of free unlimited access to “Anthony Jones: Concept Artist”
Instructor’s Welcome Note:
– My name is Anthony Jones and I am a concept artist since, I think, 2008, I forget. But I’ve been working for companies like Blizzard, Hasbro, and so on and so forth. And currently I’m a teacher and what I do is I teach young artists the ins and outs of concept art. But more importantly, I think the most important thing that I do is also keep them motivated. I find it’s not just about teaching how to paint but teaching people to keep painting.
Because a lot of the times, people are like, okay I see how you do this and how you do that. But sometimes they get distracted or they have bad time management. So I find myself, as someone who’s really good at that, I’ve learned over the last several years, so I teach people that too. And that’s kind of what I do now, yeah. Currently we’re doing a lot of VR stuff. We got a job with Insomnia to work on one of their games, which is already announced and stuff. I believe it’s Edge of Nowhere.
And we’re working on that and it’s all in the VR space. VR is pretty big now. And we’re really in that right now. As a concept artist, you know, I went from Photoshop and then to photo-bashing and then to 3D. And then the next step to me is VR. And so Unreal, Unity, all these game engines basically are out and they’re free so it’s kind of like, why not learn them? And it’s actually not too difficult to learn them.
And I always encourage my students and anybody, this is going to be the next thing everybody’s going to be complaining about, right? There’s always like one generation that’s like, “Back in my day,” you know. And I’m like, I’m already seeing that happen within my generation where people are going to be complaining about VR and I’m like, just get in it. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t. You have platforms like Lynda.com and other online tutorials that are available. A lot of their stuff is even free, it’s on YouTube, you know. There’ s no reason why you can’t learn these new tools.
And so we’re working on these things and we’re literally on the frontier of the stuff. For instance, I worked on this project, that I won’t mention, but I basically built my concept in a virtual space so they were able to fly around and see the designs, not just in the three-dimensional space. Not like a 3D file, like a jpeg of it, but actually see it with lights that they can manipulate. And they don’t have any experience. That’s the beauty. Usually you have to have a 3D guy on set or whatever, but with this, as long as you know how to play a first-person shooter, you can navigate.
I think that’s pretty cool. I imagine one day it’s going to be a year or two from now and the concepts I’ll be doing will be super epic, imagine Jarvis from Iron Man. So you’ll walk into the environment and it’s like, (sound effect noises) like lasers and all that stuff. And you see the concept come out on a dolly, you know. I imagine that could literally happen a few years from now. And the director’s like, alright approved! Because usually a lot of the reasons why you have concept art is to save a lot of money and time. But if you’re able to show the concept in real time, with real lighting, and a lot of control for the director or whoever’s in charge, they’re going to approve it almost immediately.
They’re be like a few other iterations. I think there’s still room for 2D, obviously. It’s just fast to be able to, in an hour or two demonstrate, hey this is what it’s going to go towards. Give me a couple days, or even a week, and I’ll put it into a virtual space you can just explore. And if there’s any changes, I’ll still make those changes. But the iteration stage I think will be shortened. Instead of taking months and months of like 2D iteration, I think that should only last a week or so. And then you just jump into 3D immediately. And the whole thing can be a one month turnaround.
And in terms of investors, what we did for this client. We gave them this 3D space, they showed it to their investors, and they already want to
Get 10 days of FREE unlimited access to Lynda.com.
Anthony Jones: Concept Artist
Animation Tutorials
Anthony Jones tutorials
Lynda review
from Course reviews, freebies, coupons http://www.coursetag.com/free-anthony-jones-concept-artist-3d-animation-zbrush/
No comments:
Post a Comment