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Jeremy Estrellado shared some details on his cool project.
Have you heard about the DiNusty Empire? It is a community of artists “striving to get better at what they do as well as helping fellow artists improve along the way.” Jeremy Estrellado shared some details on his cool project.
Art by Justin Myles Emerson
My name is Jeremy Estrellado, I’m a senior environment artist at Massive Entertainment Ubisoft. I’ve been doing AAA for almost 12 years now and when I was learning how to make game art there was next to nothing out there resource wise. The best three at that time to me were Polycount, 3dtotal, and Game Artisans. I wanted to fill the gaps I had going into this industry and be that place for dreamers and growers. Fast forward to today and my obsession with spreading any and all knowledge on environment art creation is peaking.
Today is the three year anniversary of the art community I started in our little corner of Discord. Some of the firsts like Chris Radsby, Mathew O, and Ben Wilson stuck around as people slowly joined, sharing anything we found useful. The need for moderators became very real as the numbers started to hit the hundreds and our forming community quickly started calling itself the Empire. We’re now approaching our next milestone of 2500 people with close to 200 Devs. We are hell-bent on learning from each other and expanding each others knowledge. Combing the internet and building upon our database of resources at the Empire Command. We have lost count now as to how many have joined the community and are now within the games industry. The sun now never sets on our empire as we stretch across the globe.
Art by Ilai Perez
In all seriousness, I just wanted to give a shout out to my beloved community and how far we have come in these three years. We have my stream, people starting podcasts, The resource hub aka The Empire command, weekly live portfolio reviews, and discord critiques, Vods on our Youtube channel, Empire art challenges including substance, heavy investment into critiquing each others work, a community Instagram page, and more.
Where do I want to take The Empire next?
We have a lot of the disciplines covered in art like:
Concept artists, Environment artists, Prop artists, Substance artists, Weapons artists, Hard surface artists, Vehicle artists, Fx Artists, and a few Character artists. What I think the next missing piece to our puzzle that could help everyone grow even more is to start drawing in the ones that Environment artists work closest with in the industry, Level Designers. This could bring in a whole new level of understanding and common language earlier to both parties. This idea really excites me.
I look forward to continuing to grow our community and forever learning as we try to become better game developers. Thank you to my amazing moderators pushing to make sure everything looks its best and how to make existing features even better. it means more then you will ever know.