How does a programmer who knows nothing about art make the art for his game?

If you want to make games long term, you can do what I'm doing and just learn art. It's going to take a hell of a long time to be good at it, but there are software programs and texturing resources out there to make it so you can get nice looking assets without needing to hand craft much of anything other than your models. Human assets can be rigged and generated easily with the right tools.

Currently I'm using a Character Creator 3, iClone, blender, Photoshop stack for the bulk of the work, and marvelous designer to make clothes. I mainly chose these because all but Photoshop can be bought without needing to pay monthly. I also pay a monthly membership to a game textures site where I can get the basic textures to make PBR materials in unreal.

I've probably paid a nice 2k for my software so far, and I know that's not in a lot of peoples budgets. There are free ways to go about it, blender and it's makehuman tool/plugin to make humans, and you can animate and make clothing inside blender just fine. I think there's even cloth simulation tools for blender to make nice looking clothing with realistic wrinkles.

This comment is probably going to be downvoted to hell, reddit game making communities will gladly say to spend a decade learning to program but say spending a few years learning art is arcane dark magics to be avoided at all costs. The real talk here though is to set a goal for your art, and follow YouTube tutorials until you can make it happen. Set a goal and some time to practice, and work on it till you can say your decent at both programming and art and you'll be a strong head and shoulders above most indie game devs if you wanted to make a career of it.

/r/gamedesign Thread