2021 has brought many exciting new projects, collaborations, and experiences. Its finale will mark a significant jubilee: 10 years of partnership with Autodesk, our allies in numerous education and business ventures.

Our collaboration dates back to the early days of the school. In January 2012, CTC became a certified Autodesk training center, and the very same year, we started with the VFX trainings that included Autodesk software packages. The high demand for talent and skills-based courses in software such as Autodesk Maya showed us that we chose the right path. A few years later (officially in 2019), we introduced specialized game art courses for training in the video game industry. 

For the past 10 years, over 1,500 attendees have taken our certified courses, and their number is continuously growing. Moreover, we are proud to say that most of these amazing people are still working in the creative industries. Of course, the success would not be possible without a small but strong “army” of lecturers from Crater Studio, as well as other companies. All of them are top professionals in the fields they lecture in with a minimum of five years of active work experience in creative industries.

Time has shown that Autodesk software attracts many digital artists eager to hone their skills in rigging, animation, scene lighting, and rendering. The 3D Essentials course certainly stands out as a fan favorite, which is why we are calling it our best-seller. This course offers an excellent base for further specializations in the field of computer graphics, and in addition to technical skills, participants are given detailed insight and first-hand advice from seniors in the computer graphics industry.

– I am satisfied with the course and the acquired skills. I learned a lot not only about modeling but also about the industry itself. The lecturers were paying attention to each of us and were open to answering all of our questions, says Nenad Nenadić, a 3D Essentials course-goer of his experience in Crater Training Center.

After completing the 3D Essentials course, our students usually opt to further specialize for jobs in video game art and post-production. On the other hand, some of them turn to video design. Precisely for these reasons, we have expanded our offerings by a number of new courses, but also through career counseling programs, mentoring, internships, and special education initiatives.

Thanks to the support of our partners, such as Autodesk, we are able to adapt the program of each of our courses according to the needs of companies interested in providing their employees with quality education. We are always open to suggestions and collaborations with new clients, whether through specialized game art and VFX education or software training.

Autodesk has also provided us extensive, ongoing support in organizing the CGA Conference dedicated to computer graphics. The next episode of this chapter awaits us next month, so make sure to clear up your schedule for November 18 and 19, 2021. That’s when the latest edition of the CGA Belgrade online conference will play out under the slogan Embracing Metaversity..

As a separate position, environment art is present in large companies specialized in producing games for PC that require complex scenes. 3D Environment Art is closely related to Level Design and is crucial for the overall game appearance. However, art positions are often not clearly defined, causing big overlaps in task distribution. The demystification of the specialized field of work that is Environment Art might, eventually, lead to better-structured working conditions in the video game industry.

At the beginning of the design process, the initial blockout of a game is usually presented by the level designer. Together with the game designer, this person creates each level with primitives corresponding to the game mechanics, gameplay, narrative, and other factors. In the early stages of production, level designers play only a supporting role, but later on, they start replacing the original primitives with specific models. This is when things would get interesting.

Then the environment designer jumps to the stage. Their main task is to understand the storyline and content in each image. To break it down into components and then break those components down into modular elements that, in essence, represent a series of smaller models. By combining these smaller models, a final scene comes to life.

Understanding the optimization process is pivotal to the environment artist. The final design largely depends on the game’s genre and art direction, but one thing is for sure: the environment design has to be bold but likable to keep the players in the game as long as possible.

The process of creating an image representing one level in the game involves different phases. The artist first breaks the scene down into components. Then further steps are being planned, and the artist starts preparing the textures. Only when textures get ready, the modeling of individual elements shall begin. In the final phase, the scene is set in the engine and all the mentioned elements are modified according to the gameplay. Eventually, when the lighting is defined, players can finally jump into the game.

At Crater Training Center, we provide specialized game art and VFX education, including the course in Environment Art.