Image source: Oreablog.com

As a digital effects artist, you will often have to work alongside other artists towards a common goal. Sometimes, that means that you have to finish what somebody else started or vice versa. It’s easy to get frustrated by handing over your work to somebody else because it’s natural to want to control the process until the very end. These tips can make you a better team player by improving your skills as a group artist.

1. Encourage Strong Communication

I’ve got a buddy who does coding for a living. A while ago he was complaining about how his boss dumped somebody else’s project onto his lap and told him to finish it. My buddy had to spend days doing nothing but trying to figure out what the code even meant. If you’ve never coded before, coding is very personal process. No two people will code the same thing the same way, so a lot of the time you have to figure out what the other coder was trying to do, kind of like figuring out how an engine works by taking it apart one piece at a time.

My friend could have skipped all of that if the original coder had done a better job annotating his code.

Image source: 2xod.com

It’s the same thing with art. Artists will often create art pieces with a specific objective in mind. When an art project changes hands, there’s a good chance that the artistic vision will get lost in translation. Help out your fellow artists by giving them insight into your creative process. For example, if you’re a 3D modeler and your boss tells you that you have to send a character over to the company’s texture artist by the end of the day, it might be a good idea to attach a document with few notations about your model. The texture artist is welcome to ignore your suggestions if he wants to go another route, but the notes will help him get on your page if he wants to respect your original vision.

2. See the Big Picture

Managers are often stuck seeing the big picture, so much so that they might miss tiny details that you think about every single day. To continue the previous example, an art manager might believe that the best way to create a 3D model is to have the modeler create the model, and then give it to the texture artist. That’s often an effective approach, but you should offer advice to managers about anything that can increase efficiency. For example, it might be a good idea to put the texture artist and the modeler in the same room for about 10 minutes before starting the project. That short brainstorming session will allow the 3D modeler to better create a model that will help the texture artist achieve a certain artist effect. You’re part of a team, so act like it by working closely with your teammates.

Image source: Scifi-meshes.com

3. Respect the Work of Your Peers

The last thing any 3D modeler wants is to spend days creating a perfect model only to have a texture artist ruin it with a crummy color scheme. It’s important to show respect for your peers and their artistic vision. If you get somebody else’s project which is clearly headed in direction A, but you’d rather take it in direction B, don’t automatically try to enforce your preferences on the art piece. If you’ll do, you’ll probably end up with some kind of sucky mixture of A and B that looks awful.