LogIn80 Level's 10th anniversary celebration continues with an insightful interview with Environment Artist and Digital Sculptor, Sherif Dawoud.
What have you been up to since we last spoke? What inspired you to "return to the roots" and shift from character sculpts to 3D scenes recently?
Sherif: Hey! Glad to be chatting with you again. Since our last interview, I've been traveling, freelancing, and working on a ton of personal projects.
I wouldn't say I shifted from character work to environments, I just like to keep things interesting and work on both. For me, personal work should be an opportunity to learn and grow as an artist and push yourself out of your comfort zone. So with every project, I try to experiment and do something new or in a slightly different way. Currently, I'm also trying to learn likeness sculpting, rigging/animation, and game design.
I'm not really a fan of specialization, I think it limits artistic growth, and it's just boring and could easily lead to burnout. I'd say working on characters has made me better at making visually appealing environments and vice versa. In either case, you're still developing skills that are useful for pretty much any form of visual art. And I don't really believe you need to specialize to be good at something.
When did your journey as an artist begin? Where do you draw inspiration from now, and how has your art style developed over time?
Sherif: I'd say my artistic journey started with drawing when I was a kid. I wasn't particularly good at it, but it was a fun hobby for a while, and I didn't really plan to be an artist, it kind of just happened. When I was younger, I just knew I wanted to work in games because I loved playing games, and at the time, making games for a living seemed like it would be a lot of fun, but I was leaning towards more technical aspects of game development like programming at first, game art was never really on my radar as I never considered myself to be an artistic person.
I started experimenting with making very simple side-scroller games early on, and then I majored in computer science at university, and I was hoping to be a game developer eventually.
But then one day I came across a Blender tutorial on YouTube, at that point, I had no idea how 3D models are made, so it was really fascinating to see the process. And since Blender is free, I thought I'd give it a try. Fast forward a couple of years, and I started posting my work online. I was mostly making Unreal Engine 4 environments at that point, and I got hired by an indie studio to work on the environments for their game. And then I was officially a Game Artist, which I wasn't expecting at all since 3D was just a hobby for me. But it's been a very fun and rewarding journey so far, and I wouldn't change a thing.
I look for inspiration pretty much everywhere, in nature and by observing the world around me. In other forms of media, like books, movies, video games, photography, and paintings. I also like to spend some time studying artworks that I like, and try to understand why they work the way they do. Specifically, I try to pay attention to how the artist uses things like composition, forms, values, and color to guide the viewer's eye and tell a story. Studying great artworks is a good way to learn what works and what doesn't, and then you can experiment with that in your own work
How would you say the industry has changed over the past decade?
Sherif: It's hard to make general statements on the industry, but I'd say one change that I liked is how easy it is to find remote work now. Back then, it was a bit rare to find remote work, and most studios prioritized hiring on-site employees, but thanks to COVID, that has changed a bit.
Compared to when I started, the gaming industry job market definitely changed for the worse, especially in the past couple of years, with the mass layoffs in a lot of the larger studios. I feel like I got lucky that the industry was growing early in my career, and it was very easy to find work. I can't imagine how difficult it must be to try to get your foot in the door now. But on the other hand, it's easier than ever for indie and solo developers to get started making games, there are more tools and learning resources available now than ever.
Another thing I realized is that working in an art/creative job doesn't always mean you'll get to be creative, in fact, it seems like that's rarely the case. You won't always get to work on what you want, and on most projects, the majority of artists would be working to realize a vision made by a very few people, and you'll have very little creative input.
For me, that's one of the main reasons I love to work on personal projects whenever I can. I get to work on things I like and be creative with no limitations. And counterintuitively, I feel like it lowers the risk of burnout compared to when I wasn't doing any personal art.
What can you tell us about the capabilities of 3D software and game engines compared to where they were 10 years ago?
Sherif: When I started learning 3D art, I was using pretty much the same tools I'm still using today. Some of these tools changed significantly over the years, and some didn't really change much, like ZBrush. It has always been perfect.
Substance 3D Designer was new back then, and studios were quickly starting to adopt it for tileable textures. They have added a lot of new features and nodes since then, now, Substance 3D is kind of the standard for texture work in games.
I was using Unreal Engine as well, which has undergone a lot of updates in the past decade, specifically to lighting capabilities. Now we have really cool features like Lumen, and it's easier than ever to make photorealistic real-time environments. But that’s kind of a double-edged sword, it looks great out of the box, which could disincentivize artists from experimenting with lighting, shaders, and post processing to push the look of their game/project further, which makes games made with Unreal look very similar.
Another big change in rendering/lighting is real-time ray tracing. In the past few years, I've been rendering most of my work with real-time ray tracing in Marmoset, and it's really cool how easy it is to get image quality that is close to pre-rendered engines almost instantly. A big advantage with this approach is that I can make changes to the project and quickly see how these changes affect the render in real time. It's a very intuitive workflow, especially if you're working on something like a likeness sculpture that requires a lot of small iterations and changes.
Overall though, I think we're well past the point of diminishing returns when it comes to advances in graphics in video games. There are games that were released 10+ years ago that would still look visually impressive if they were released today, namely games like The Order 1886, Assassin's Creed Unity, and Rise of the Tomb Raider.
So yeah, I don't think there's anything that we can do now that we couldn't 10 years ago. Adding extra detail or cooler lighting technology isn't going to add much value to the player experience. I think going forward, what will set visually impressive games apart is focusing more on the basic art fundamentals like composition and color/values, and less on adding detail.
Which year has been the most challenging for you, and which one would you consider the most successful?
Sherif: I'd say the most challenging year was 2022, mainly due to the rise of generative AI. At the time, I was really concerned about the viability of art as a career in the future. It was a very stressful year seeing all these advancements and not knowing whether 3D art would be affected or not. At that time, I was seriously considering a career shift to something that was less likely to be impacted by automation. It took me a while to come to terms with that uncertainty, but then again, job security was non-existent in the industry way before AI, so practically not much has changed.
I know some artists view generative AI as a tool, but it's hard to agree with that when this tool is basically doing the whole process for you, and it requires negligible input from the author. And that's not even mentioning the concerns over the use of copyrighted data without permission in training these models. Automation definitely has its place, it would be great to automate the boring aspects of 3D art like UV mapping and retopology, but automating the most fun and rewarding parts of the process sounds like a terrible idea.
I don't think AI is a threat at the moment, but unfortunately, that could change in the future. If that happens, I'll probably find something else to do for a living, as I have no interest in integrating this technology into my work. But art will probably always be part of my life, regardless of whether it's my main job or not.
My best year was probably 2023-2024. After a long time of not doing any personal art, I decided to get back to doing that regularly, I started with making smaller, more manageable projects just to stay consistent. I tried to pick projects that I could complete in 1-2 weeks, working maybe 1-2 hours a day. And occasionally, I'd tackle more time-consuming projects. I learned a lot during these last couple of years. Also, I've been posting my work regularly on social media, and I'm very grateful for the responses I'm getting. It's very encouraging.
What would you wish for Digital Artists, Game Developers, and the 80 Level team in 2025 and beyond?
Sherif: To Digital Artists, I know the industry is in a bad shape right now, but that will probably change someday, you gotta focus on what you can change and just work on improving your skills. Wishing you all the best in these difficult times!
To the 80 Level team, thank you so much for inviting me to do this interview, I'm grateful to be considered for this. You've built a really cool community, I've discovered a lot of awesome artists and have learned a lot from your articles. Happy anniversary, and I wish you all the best in the future!