Feng Rip Off!! ART THIEF!! did he steal your work too???

[Jason Manley]

hey all...

this guy is applying to differnt game companies with fengs work that he butchered. Some of it may belong to you. if you work for a game studio beware. if you dont...feel free to email him and let him know how you feel about it

click on his environments

http://personal.inet.fi/koti/scott.austin/portfolio/index.htm


j

www.artbyfeng is fengs link for comparison.

[Sketch]

OMFG! Ha ha ha. How the hell does he expect people to believe he did those enviroment drawings... after looking at his sketches and matte paintings you can tell he isn't skilled enough to do those. What an idiot!

[Jason Manley]

here is his main page

http://personal.inet.fi/koti/scott.austin/

[mcotie]

done!! message sent.

[mcotie]

this guy has already removed the environments from his site. I hope he shit a peach pit.

[sparth]

that dude is so funny. i love his own definition of "matte painting"...

[Jason Manley]

the mattes...lol...terragen renders...hahahah

he took down the feng rip offs...did anyone download them?


he must have gotten a pile of emails from the eatpoo crowd..i posted this over there too.


did anyone dowload the feng riip offs he did?

i should have just to keep them in this thread for an example of what NOT to do.

his concept career is toast for the most part...i would bet good money that even the guys over at lucas ranch saw that stuff. after all, if i found it you know that they did.


jason

[Coma]

Not like he really had a chance at ca anyway...
well... not unless he studies more.

[negativespace]

I missed it. I got home too late. Did he just trace over Feng's drawings or did he actually grab the images off of Feng's site and post it on his?

[Oblio]

check out his sketches!
those are "Poser sketch renders" butchered! :D
THE LOOSER!

[Jason Manley]

he both painted on fengs images and if he was feeling lazy would just desaturate them and save it...and then call them his own.

painting on them consisted of putting text on the ground and thats it.

total thievery.


j

[Lono]

we had a skin artist apply at Rogue once with a portfolio full of hacked or completely ripped off quake 3 skins.
just for humor we gave him an art test. we gave him a completely forign creature model to skin, and what he turned in was the bigest joke. it looked like the art of an eight year old.
what the fuck did he think was going to happen if we actually hired his fraudulant ass? did he really think we wouldnt notice that his "real" work was completely SHIT??

heres the funniest part. before we had the chance to bring it to our art director attention that this guy was a fake,, he actually paied to fly this fuck hole to the office for an interview. heres the kicker,,,, the dude had NO industry experience and he told us that he wouldnt settle for a salary lower than 80 grand a year! AHHHHHhahahahahahaha!

what a a dumb shitty fuck!

-Lono

[Fisa]

that brings light to another subject. what do you think one should do to protect themselves from things like that? small low res pics on your site, watermarks?

[Jason Manley]

the opposite i would think EXPOSURE so that your work is easily recognized.


j

[JoshuaTheJames]

damn lol Feng can't get a break... isn't this the second time?

-Joshua

[SkeletonDog]

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery...I don't know what they say about straight up ripoff though...

[Rad]

dude that is seriously the funniest thing I have ever heard of. I wouldn't worry about that happening to you though. If your stuff is worth ripping off then chances are that your good enough for it not to matter.

[R_M]

Whoa this is like a shark frenzy!
I ALMOST feel sorry for the guy...

Still he must have had it comming. Guess we all have our skeletons hidden away, but to use them to get a job!?!

If there is one good thing about this affair, it is how you guys rallied togheter, in support of feng. Copyright is really a weird thing, I haven't really sent any portfolios around yet, but I do wonder who is going to see them, and how they are going to be used.
My worst fear is that some A.D. sees my portfolio and thinks "Nice idea, but execution is woth shit, I'll pass it down to guys and see what they make of it"
This probaly comes from being inexperienced on my part, what do yo think of this?
R_M

[-W.-]

what i don't understand ,how he planed to produce concepts if he had get the job wouldn't it be hard to find feng pic's wich fit the topic ,after a while :D

and i agree with mr. manley the best way to protect agains this is get famous .in the end of it there is always someone who knows the pic already ,like this time.


www.artbyfeng.com <-- (the "full" link ,but i guess you already know :p )

[R_M]

Maybe he hope that there wheren't that many SW fans out there...

[Fozzybar]

I like the description of one of his characters:

"Rutger concept for the Sandworld project. Rutger was originally bald. But after he got his hair he was dark and about twenty years younger than in the final concept."

Wow! ;)

If your artwork is bad, make your concept/description worse...

[keyth]

once again...i miss out on all the fun.:(

[egerie]

Remins me of Wild E. Coyote and ACME.. Altho this guys' ongoing love story is with metacreation...........
:crazy: :crazy: :crazy: :crazy: :crazy: :crazy: :crazy: :crazy:

[KayCustomz]

He'll never get a job huh?

[wes9000]

wow...

oh yeah, he still has up a sketch of a droid that I'm pretty sure he ripped off of Khang Le (If my memory serves me correct)...

[negativespace]

For those that don't read eatpoo, Scott himself responded. Here's his excuse:

Hi, I'm the guy that caused all this fun for you guys. I've already contacted mr Shu and explainen to him the situation. My email:


My name is Scott Austin and I'm sure that by now you aware of all the hulabaloo about my using your pictures on my site. I hope you will here me out...

FIRST: I would like to apoligize for any discomfort I've caused. I will
not however apoligize for passing them off as my own for that was NOT MY INTENTION. I know this sounds very rude but please let me continue... I have a very basic setup at home which means no scanner. I travel 300 km every few months to my dad's and use his. So when making my site I use what I have and tempararily subsitute the rest with photos (usually) that represent the same kind of setup I'm going for. As of lately I've began to study the same techniques that most concept artists such as yourself, Doug Chiang etc. use. I guess that is why I made the mistake of using a couple of your environment pics to setup my pages. In my hurry to get my site finally up and going I accidently published the unfinished Environment page with your pics still on it.

Even worse I sent it out to various gaming companies. You can guess the result...

I know that this probably sounds like a REAL LAME excuse but thats how it really went. I mean, you being who you are, only a complete idiot would try to pass off your pictures for his own. I might as well just upload a bunch of Ralph MaQuarrie concepts and say "Hey look at my neat scifi pictures". I work with the internet everyday and know as well as anyone what would happen...

I'm part of a couple forums myself so I know how a witch hunt starts and keeps going and going... I don't mind you all tearing my samples apart (some people call it critique ) I do however find it kind of shocking how fast a lynch mob was formed. It seems only "imager777" was even close to being on track.

As for the Poser theory... A while ago Metareyes became free for MAX. Try it befor throwing those kind of accusations around. The clothes were made with Clothreyes and touched up in Photoshop. (Great for stills kind of worse for animations )

If you've read this far I would like to ask you all to please try and keep the hatemail to these kind of forums. The reason being a little girl at home who gets kind of confused when instead of mail from her grandparents theres a variaty of four letter words!

I know this won't end here though... I mean hey, we all like a witch hunt, right?

[sparth]

"Even worse I sent it out to various gaming companies. You can guess the result... "

i would have swallowed the whole thing if there had not been this sentence in the middle.

the guy can call it like he wants, witch hunt, finger pointing....

having his own art stolen and ripped off is the most humiliating and unfair thing that can happen to an artist. putting so much effort into art, and sharing stuff on the net, it's nearly sacred. this choice has to be respected. if it isn't, trespassers will be prosecuted.
if such "witch hunts" can prevent dudes from using materials that aren't theirs, so be it.

[Fozzybar]

witch hunt? I actually don't care about his perspective in this industry...if he's good, he'll get a job like in every industry...

The problem is:

"I work with the internet everyday and know as well as anyone what would happen... "

...if someone works everyday with the internet, it can't be that he makes such a mistake:

"In my hurry to get my site finally up and going I accidently published the unfinished Environment page with your pics still on it."

I mean, no one would upload something without checking it afterwards...???

[MindCandyMan]

Yeah seriously fozzy...even if you were using a program like dreamweaver who wouldn't upload their website and then check everything... Man that is so lame... If I sent out my portfolio to game companies I would be checking my site every five minutes to make sure it didn't go down or go over the bandwidth limit...etc... Seems awfully suspicious.

[KayCustomz]

this thread is still going

[killing.people]

what a fuck head, i am glad everyone is making a big deal of it. forums are the real copyright protectors. :P

[DragonGX]

Youd think that if he was a serious artist trying to get a job he could shell out a few bucks for a scanner. I mean 300km jsut to use a scanner?after a few trips the gas would pay for the scanner.. :rolleyes:

[Fozzybar]

DragonGX :D

[Rad]

Why on earth would this guy be aplying for a job? Does he not realize he is an inept artist. He's definitely lying.