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Our Mission
WE HAVE A MISSION TO MAKE PRACTICAL EDUCATION ACCESSIBLE TO THOSE WITH THE SAME PASSION.
As a team of industry veterans obsessed with game art, we’ve painstakenly turned art into a science - masterfully crafting a step-by-step curriculum featuring the best, tried and tested mentoring techniques with a high success rate of future employment.
Environment
Over the course of the program, you'll learn the skills and techniques needed to bring your creative visions to life and captivate players with your worlds. Here’s what you’ll get from this course:
- Create custom models and textures to populate your worlds.
- Learn to optimise your models for their use in game engines.
- Author materials and textures to bring your assets and surfaces to the next level.
- Assemble your scenes and compose key frames for stunning visual results.
- Bring your scenes to life with the latest lighting and rendering techniques.
Props
Over the course of the program, you'll learn the techniques needed to model, texture, and render game assets that look great and fit seamlessly into your game environments. Here’s what you’ll get from this course:
- Bring your ideas to life with the most efficient modelling techniques.
- Learn to optimise your models for their use in game engines.
- Create outstanding materials and textures to bring your objects to life.
- Tell your object’s story with lighting and rendering.
- Collaborate with Environment Artists to populate your worlds.
Characters
Coming soon. Stay tuned!
Weapons
Coming soon. Stay tuned!
2 Groups, 50 Students
1 Scene, 8 Months
Two Groups
UNDIVIDED ATTENTION
Our instructors prioritize building a collaborative learning community, fostering close relationships among students and instructors alike. This enables personalized coaching from teachers alongside peer-to-peer guidance.
We limit our classes to 25 students each to ensure you´ll have plenty of personalised attention, and with our emphasis on team collaboration and dedicated workshop time, you´ll develop strong teamworking skills that will serve you well in the professional world.
During the course you will have the opportunity to work on actual AAA non-client projects. You’ll learn how to give and receive feedback - clear and concise, with humility and empathy. You’ll learn to adhere to our quality expectations. Most importantly, you’ll learn to employ practical techniques and tools that are used in a large, multidisciplinary and international studio like ours.
TARGETED LEARNING
STUDIO-READY TRAINING.
We equip you with the essential skills required to graduate work-force ready. A successful career in game art development is more than just creating beautiful visuals. We make sure you leave with what it takes to be a professional: Communication, teamwork, collaboration and emotional regulation (trust us, you’ll need this).
You will be taught in a professional environment and will be expected to work as one of us. There will be tons of hands-on learning, making mistakes, solving problems and honest feedback. This is not a course for the faint of heart.
Onyx Studio has a team of exceptional artists - and we only hire professionals. Naturally, we realised there was a gap in the market: most graduates aren’t studio-ready. This course was designed with hitting the ground running in mind, by industry veterans with years of experience working in the trenches. We help you bridge the gap between a graduate with a skill and a full-time, paid artist.
WHAT YOU GET
LEARN AND EARN
The Learn and Earn program has been specially designed to provide you with an opportunity to gain knowledge and hone your skills while earning money. The art produced during the course will be monetised to fund the academy, but each launched pack will include a total pool of 30% net revenue to be split evenly between all students who participated in the packs.
This way you can recover any investments you made to be able to follow the courses, like software licenses, or any plugins you wanted to use to speed up your workflows.
Reach out to us
ANY QUESTIONS?
If you have any questions for us or our instructors, please contact us via our email, info@onyx-academy.com. Our team will get back to you as soon as possible to ensure you get all the extra information you need!
We have also compiled some of your questions into a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) which you will find below!
Alternatively, you can Join our Discord, where you´ll be able to chat not only with us, but with other students and applicants who have the same questions you do!
You Ask, We Answer
FAQ
DO I NEED A PORTFOLIO TO APPLY TO THE COURSES?
Short answer - Yes.
Unfortunately, and for these first semesters, we won´t be offering courses for complete beginners. This means we need to see a very basic level of understanding of game art. We need to see a portfolio for this.
Your portfolio doesn´t need to be super advanced tho, we are happy with seeing at least 1 piece of game art taken from high poly to low, bakes and textures. It can be something as simple as a knife or a gameboy.
HOW ARE THE COURSES FREE?
There´s mainly two reasons for this. We believe high end education should be accessible for highly dedicated people, and in exchange systems as a means of payment, so during the course, students will be asked for a few art deliveries that will be used to fund the school via art marketplaces.
This way we trade time for time, and not time for money, and the students get the opportunity to work in projects that are as close to production as possible from day 1, plus you´ll earn a percentage of the generated revenue from the packs thanks to our Learn and Earn program.
We also provide students with the opportunity to work in our studio after the course completion, so this also helps us ensure we hire well trained artists that help us grow our teams successfully.
DOES THE COURSE OFFER ANY SORT OF ACADEMIC VALUE?
No, but we don ́t see the need for it. The games industry asks for demonstrable knowledge, not titles, so we focus on giving you the tools to build your path either with us or on your own.
WILL THE SCHOOL PROVIDE LICENSES FOR THE SOFTWARE USED DURING THE COURSES?
Since students will work on commercial projects from day 1, we can ́t really provide education licenses without breaking the terms of use for those licenses, so it ́s likely that licenses will have to be purchased by students. We don ́t see this as a problem.
Much of the software we use during the course is free of use or open source, with just a few exceptions, for which we will do our best to provide alternatives for those who really need them, and offer the Learn and Earn program partially for you to be able to recover any investments you had to make during the course.
WHAT IS THE SCHEDULE FOR THE CLASSES?
At this moment, we have one semester, starting the 1st of November and ending on the 30th of June.
We are based in Europe mainly, GMT+1 time zone. We ask our students to allocate at least 6-8 hours of their day to properly learn to work with us. This means, 2 hours a day classes + 6 hours of project working time.
For us in Europe, that is 9:30am-17:30pm in GMT+1 time. Our classes start and end from 9:30am-11:30 and 11:30-13:30, depending on the specialisation you chose when applying. Four extra hours for open sessions are available from 13:30-17:30.
We know it may sound like a lot, but we consider the sacrifice fair for what the industry is requiring now.
If you live outside of Europe, please consider what these times translate to, and how you can accommodate the classes to your schedule. We can offer some advice here, like splitting the day into project work, then classes if you are ahead of our time zone for example.
HOW IS MY PERFORMANCE GOING TO BE MEASURED DURING THE COURSE?
Art is difficult to measure, so this will mainly be determined by your effort, ability to deliver, and attendance to the classes. We are training the next generation of artists that will be given the chance to work with us, so we ask students to treat this process as seriously as they would treat their jobs.
If you show professionality and care for your soon to be team mates and your own work, it is highly likely that you will succeed during the course.
WILL STUDENTS BE ABLE TO UPLOAD THE WORK THEY MADE DURING THE COURSE TO THEIR DESIRED SOCIAL NETWORK, E.G. ARTSTATION OR LINKEDIN?
Yes, in pre-approved formating and logo-ing provided by the academy.
WILL STUDENTS BE HIRED BY ONYX STUDIO AT THE END OF EACH COURSE?
Yes, but depends on the moment, potentially all potentially a few. We will always aim to hire as many as possible with anyone who is successful but not eligible for hiring being the first to be called up once a position is opened. We have great ambitions for growth in the future so the odds are your opportunity might be coming sooner than expected.
WHAT TYPE OF CONTRACT IS OFFERED IF I GET HIRED BY ONYX STUDIO?
6 Month full time (40hrs week) paid probation, afterwards either fulltime 12-24 months contracts or hourly freelance.
WHAT IS THE APPROXIMATE SALARY RANGE ONYX STUDIO OFFERS?
Salaries are deduced primarily on skill and need levels. Our parent company is an international enterprise so the salary spectrum varies by a large margin, however we strive to provide equal opportunities to anyone applying.
