Eni Oken


Zork Grand Inquisitor

Eni Oken
Freelance 3D Digital Artist/Instructor

Current project:
Online workshops for 3D Artists. I am developing a series of very practical, hands-on online workshops targeted specifically for 3D computer graphics artists of various fields. Each workshop contains reading material published on a dedicated web site, practical assignments to be fulfilled by the students and a forum of discussions, where all students participate and comment on their colleagues' work. My role is to develop and produce material for the workshops (practical and reading), instruct students on how to do assignments, moderate the forum and comment and guide them through their work. The results show students how to appreciate the online learning experience as an extremely gratifying one.

Academic Info

College: I graduated as an Architect in Brazil, in my hometown Santos
Degree: I have a bachelor in Architecture and have received top honors with the highest average grade of my class.

Were there any particular projects or areas of study that you pursued?
Before starting to work on computer graphics, I pursued a number of artistic areas, including toy and furniture design, scenic design, fashion and window-dressing. After starting with computer graphics, I worked with architectural visualization, games and interactive 3D projects.

Did you do any internships?
Specifically in computer graphics, yes, for about 6 months, in 1987, in a small CAD studio in Brazil.

Career Info

Tell us about your first job in the industry. How did you get the job? What was it like? What were your responsibilities?
I moved to the US in 1994 and found a job in a small computer graphics company developing the game Congo, based on the movie of same name. Although I had plenty of experience in architectural visualization (seven years of work as a freelancer and teacher), I had never worked in games before, so it was a good experience, which allowed me to try out my hand in a new field.

The game was a pre-rendered adventure puzzle type and I was responsible for creating a series of pre-rendered environments in Egyptian/ruin style. After a while I started focusing more on texture work, re-working models made by other artists and finally I worked on some of the characters (monkeys and gorillas), both texturizing and animating.

What jobs have you held in the games industry thus far? Briefly describe the career path you took to get where you are today.
After my first and only job in-house (above), I went back to being a freelance artist, developing work from my own home-studio for a number of different companies. The bulk of my work is creating pre-rendered fantasy environments, with heavily texturized and ornamental surfaces. I worked on 3 projects for Activision, including Zork Nemesis, Zork Grand Inquisitor and Civilization 3, but I also worked on a variety of other non-game projects, mostly interactive edutainment titles, for Alfred Publishing, CAA Intel, Hasbro, Launch Interactive Magazine. I worked a bit on realtime projects, for Sony and Mr. Film, when I learned to appreciate and respect real-time texture art and its limitations. Texture work is my forte and after a while, I was invited to write for magazines and speak at conferences. So I wrote a number of articles for the 3D magazine and other printed and online publications (3D Café, Bill Fleming, Design Freak, 3D Online) and also for a couple of books by New Riders Publishing. I've lectured many times at well-known conferences such as the extinct 3D Conference, Game Developers Conference and NATE.

Advice

What fields of study, specific courses, or life experiences would you recommend to students interested in your field?
I think information is the key to success: I would recommend that a person know everything there is to know about the specific field they wish to enter. Because developing games is such a relatively new area and is constantly changing, it's fundamental for the student to acquire as much knowledge about the field as possible. That includes not only their specific area of expertise, for example, how to technically work on a visual project, but also to know who are the main developers, what are the most important titles being released, what developers are looking for and the game trends.

Is there anything you wish someone had told you before you got into the games industry? Is there anything you would have done differently?
No, I wouldn't have done anything different, but I wished that someone had alerted me to the long hours and grueling competition in this area: I might have considered twice before entering such a demanding field. The area of computer graphics for games seems very attractive for beginners, who only see the bright side of making beautiful graphics and receiving recognition; they fail to see that it takes very hard work to get anywhere in this area.

As games increase in complexity, what are the various kinds of jobs that you foresee development companies needing in the next five years?
I cannot elaborate in programming and other areas which are not my specialty, but I do foresee a higher degree of specialization in the artistic side of gaming, as exists already in the film industry: an artist no longer works on all aspects of a game, he or she will specialize in order to become the very best in their specific niche. This produces art that is highly non-personalized, with one person doing the modeling, another working on animation and yet another working on color and lighting (texturing).

Do you have any other advice or recommendations to share with students who are interested in doing what you do?
As part of the specialization, being a freelancer is becoming more difficult, since most companies want their employees to work in-house in order to have more interaction and control. And since job stability is almost non-existent in this field, with companies laying off entire staffs after a project is done, there is virtually no reason at all for a company to hire a freelancer, except when the artist has a unique artistic style.

Students and beginners need to realize this is a field where they will work long hours, have little job stability and jump around a lot, from company to company, moving many times across the country to find the right job. If they are willing to deal with these kinds of sacrifices, then working in games can be very rewarding, both personally and financially.