I recently took the challenge of trying out for ArenaNet’s Creature Artist Intern position. I tried to work on the creature as soon as I had the opportunity to. I’m not sure how long the position is to remain open, so I opted for working quickly and efficiently, with still care for and attention to detail.
You can view my submission by clicking here.
I made my submission last week and haven’t heard back, so I went forward with posting the details of my process. Hopefully I wasn’t completely disregarded earlier on, as the submission form confused me about the method behind presenting the content.
I had an issue plaguing me for a day, where there were extremely visible seams wherever i made UV cuts on my model. After some research, I found out something a solution I had not experienced before. Apparently sometimes you need to invert a normal map’s green channel within Photoshop when working with symmetry.
xNormal was generating poor normal maps for me, as well no matter how I tweaked the settings. I almost gave up on making the normals perfect without manually editing them when I discovered some alternate means of generating normal maps. 3D Coat has a feature where you can bake texture information down from a high resolution mesh into a low resolution just like xNormal. It sometimes gave me better results, but not all the time.
I also went above the 7500 polygon limit briefly due to a bug that was causing my faces to be literally doubled in some areas within some .objs. (I’m still not clear on what happened though) This happened in the horns, the front skull, and I had similar issues with my edges on the body.
I’m really hoping for a breakthrough with ArenaNet to get a job, since I need to be able to support myself and my girlfriend. Hopefully I hear back from them soon, and can update this post with whether I obtained the position or not!