Vertex School

I took the environment art boot camp in October of 2018. My previous education up to that point was self taught using YouTube and Udemy. Once I hit the wall with self-teaching, I looked to Vertex School to put me in contact with professionals in the industry.... Read More It's really easy to just do the curriculum and call it a day but if you want to succeed and be qualified for hiring at a AAA studio, expect to do more than what is expected of you. During the weekly interviews with professionals, I reached out personally to them to ask questions. I spent time outside of the meeting hour to talk to my mentor. Beyond that, I took it upon myself to go to the meet ups of the local International Game Developers Association, while also volunteering time as a camera operator so I can get free access to the annual conference. I attended GDC and made contacts. I made sure to keep in touch with those contacts, be it social media or email. My point is, Vertex school helped me by getting me in touch with those that are the top of the industry. I was responsible for the rest.

Prior to Vertex I had very little knowledge programs. I only knew a little bit of Maya. Now I’m comfortable using Maya, Zbrush, Substance Designer, Painter, and etc. I also very much enjoy the Vertex Community where there are full of people exchanging... Read More infos and feedbacks. I've been enrolled in Vertex since from 2019-2020. I took two bootcamps / one immersive / one Vertex term 3 course. I still work with alumni from Vertex school with game project that started in Vertex in September 2020. Vertex school is one of those schools where you can get lots of help if you are willing to look for it. I guarantee you that if you are willing to push yourself, you will be able to get a lot out of this bootcamp. I know lots of online sites that will teach you skills, but don’t worry about you after you finish the course, however, when I was enrolled in Vertex, I felt that I was a part of the school community. John Waynick / Scott Kingslien were super supportive and helped me a lot even after I graduated. With the knowledge and portfolio that I’ve made at Vertex, I was able to put my foot into the game industry. Super grateful that I’ve joined to Vertex :D

They give you a basic TA session once a week, where everyone in the course goes over their own project. You have to wait for everyone else to have one-on-one converations with the instructor while you wait. They don't attempt to schedule around people's... Read More lives, so you have to make a 3-4 hour allowance in your schedule to do this, at whatever time they decide. The resources consist of hour long youtube videos, with fairly limited documentation. It's quite a lot of material and much of it is good. But it's an unorganized pile and extremely difficult to sort through. And the material is undifferentiated by experience level or prior knowledge. There are no supplemental, remedial materials. Or if there are , the administration is disinterested and unorganized and won't necessarily point you in the right direction. I think the intentions are good, but the school is overly generous in what levels it is attempting to teach simultaneously and, in doing so, is giving a sub-par experience for certain experience levels. I would be careful about making the plunge without any prior experience, thinking they will be able to train you adequately for a job. Personally, I'm doing it for a hobby. In that context, it's adequate, if a bit pricey.

The program has a good baseline curriculum to introduce students to basic game industry pipelines and tools, as well as industry professionals who give valuable critiques in their respective courses . In fact, the AAA studio professionals who teach the... Read More various bootcamps are probably the best reason to attend a Vertex course. On the contrary, while enthusiastic, the core academic instructors & faculty fall into over-promising and under-delivering, and much of the job support is left to the students to figure out on their own (most job leads you find on your own or other students post; the faculty seems to have little to do with it until you get a job and they can nab your testimonial). As soon as the course ends, responses from the core faculty (not the guest instructors who work in AAA studios) becomes non-existent, and your best resource becomes Google. With so many other places doing online teaching and grabbing top-tier talent to deliver courses, faculty support and job hunt support would have been critical to set Vertex apart from the others. That being said, the skills learned here could probably be picked up elsewhere, especially if you find a place that offers better targeted learning towards your desired path (and guest instructors from studios that fit your style and interests), and less of a general assortment of topics.

I always wanted to be a character artist for a game company and have been saying this since I was in the 7th grade (in the 90s, dating myself there). The program I attended for my master's study was good but wasn't driven toward video game development,... Read More but more for advertisements and cinema. I attended a class and a few webinars under Ryan Kingslien previously such as ZBrush Cert (2 different versions) and thought to jump on board with his bootcamp. Not only did Ryan teach us about anatomy, which is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT for ANY STYLE of game mind you, but he also taught us the philosophy behind what we were doing and how to think in those terms. He wanted us to visualize what we were doing and how to approach it, rather than blindly placing forms and shapes down without much thought. He wanted to see passion and drive from his students and pushed us to apply what we've learned in our project.

This course encouraged us to blend aesthetics with the technology. It was great that Jared (I forget his last name, sorry!) from Epic Games to teach us the technical aspects for designing our characters. We learned how to utilize industry standards such as ZBrush, Marvelous Designer, Substance Painter and then render our project in Marmoset Toolbag. I must point out, Ryan was also heavy into using ZBrush, and his approach was different than Jared's where he really wanted to push the anatomy of the character and promote aesthetically pleasing forms. The marriage of appealing art backed with technical skills pushed my work into a realm I could only imagine prior to taking this bootcamp.

After the bootcamp, I had to figure out how to get a job (I come from an early iteration of the bootcamp and job support happened after I found one). My work was good enough for representatives of companies I applied at to actually contact me and set up interviews and art tests. My break didn't come until almost a year later, however, when I applied to an indie game company called Sinful Monarchy. They saw that I had the skills and wanted to improve so they gave me a chance! A year later, I'm still with them developing the craziest, most photorealistic game I've ever encountered. My home is in the Character Dev department, but I have floated between Texture and Rig/Anim teams. These people are SUPER detailed oriented, and you need to know your stuff, but at the same time, we are constantly learning from each other and pushing each other on how to do better. I even had the opportunity to teach some of my colleagues what I know, from giving tips to actually authoring pipelines for certain assets.

Was it expensive? Yes. Does it cost less than tuition? Hell yes!
Couldn't have done this without you Ryan!

Before I joined the Character Artist Bootcamp in April 2018, I could barley finish projects and felt that I was getting nowhere in 3d.
But when I signed up for the bootcamp at GAI it all changed. I had two amazing mentors, Ryan Kingslien and Marcin Klicki,... Read More who gave me the push that I needed! I had three months of intensive training, first creating a game ready prop and then a full game ready character. I learned the entire process step by step following an amazing collection of videos, recorded by industry professionals specifically for GAI students, as well as biweekly live meetings with my mentors. On top of it all there is an amazing community and live interviews with industry professionals. Sometimes we would even get portfolio reviews from the interviewee's.
Finally I felt that for the first time I was actually getting somewhere as a 3d artist. Unfortunately I wasn't able to finish my character in time, but even after the bootcamp was over, I still received guidance from my mentors and I was able to finish my first full character!
The one thing that sets GAI apart from a traditional uni or college is that you still have access, to all the videos, community, and interviews, after you've completed the bootcamp. There's even a weekly live critique session with Ryan.
So if you're a passionate 3d artist and feel lost, then GAI is the perfect place to learn from the best and find your feet as a 3d artist...

Game Art Institute is an amazing place, I was part of the April Character Art Bootcamp, my mentors and teachers were Ryan Kingslien and Marcin Klicki. The 1st assignment was to create a realistic prop to get me comfortable with substance painter and learn... Read More how to create a work process of my own to obtain accuracy, material expression, working with a polycount budget and making the best that I could with it. My second project was to create a character from a concept, even though I did not finish the character before the Bootcamp was over it was perfectly ok, because even after the end of the boot camp I was still given assistance and guidance to be able to have a finished product, I believe that this is because Ryan and the mentors there want you to be able to get a job from the work you are putting out, it is not treated like an average school assignment. It was a great experience, interacting with like-minded students, sharing workflows with each other, building a sense of camaraderie with each other, being surrounded by a community that will go out of its way to help you out, having a full library of specific high-quality tutorials to answer any question you have, weekly interviews with artist working in the industry. In my opinion, if you end up taking this class not only will you grow as an artist but also as a person.

Tips
In my opinion to get the best experience out of this class is to:
-reach out to people in the community
-help others if you know you can
-establish communications with your fellow boot camp students (you'll find that you have a lot in common and in a very short amount of time you will find yourself gaining a full classroom of friends that you want the best for them as well as they will do for you :D ! )
-make a schedule and stick to it!
-if you mess up or feel like you are not progressing reach out to your mentors
-give it your best, you owe it to yourself!

The bootcamp is one of the best decisions I've made in my life. I've come pretty far from where I used to be 2 months ago, and I feel like I keep going further.

Ryan, Susan, the team and especially my Mentor have all been super helpful with pushing me... Read More to help me obtain my real potential and then some. (Hey, there's always room for improvement!)

What's even more astounding about the Game Art Institute is the community built around it. There are a lot of helpful, professional, and passionate individuals that share like mindsets, I think that is worth its weight in gold. There's also so many helpful tutorials and articles that get shared around and are apart of the Bootcamp itself.

If you do join, do the work, put in maximum effort, ASK A LOT OF QUESTIONS, thats how you will see results.

Ryan Kingslien and crew are some of the most knowledgeable artist working in Zbrush today. Their expertise in other applications is equally amazing as well. What GAI does is put you in the saddle with industry experts to keep you on task and moving at... Read More a studio pace. The workflows are not up to date, they are up to the minute! The instructor's coming from their respective studios to do live training and introduce workflows that have been used only for weeks to get a complex problem done. The only complaint I had has actually been fixed since I attended and they provide supplemental training as well. If you are self-taught or learned the training videos this will fill in all the gaps. If you learned at a University and things didn't sink in or you needed more tutelage this program will fill in the gaps.

As a working technical artist who trains others, I always want to teach current workflows this Bootcamp should be on everyone's resume!