Planning and Concepting

Compared to other courses, Game Art Design at DeMontfort has a heavy influence of 2d traditional artwork built into the course. The idea is that being a successful painter/sculptor will consequently make us a better Game Artist/modeller.

Also the guys at Blitz think having a strong traditional background is essential.

A games finished product is as result of a series of processes ultimately beginning with ideas and concepts. Concept art isn’t there to look pretty and make you go wooow it’s so beautiful, it serves a vital process in creating the overall feel and atmosphere of the game and ultimately, decides how well it sells

The important thing about concept art also is that we, as the consumers don’t get to see everything that is produced, just the finished painting. Despite how I (try too) digital paint, professional piartists spend a lot of time on planning things such as composition, subject and colour palet etc. so that they can create the best piece of work possible, everything is thought out.

Every brush stroke isn’t there by chance, it looks amazing because it’s been developed and fully planned out.

I think in the future ill have to start putting a little more thought into my digital paintings, I normally just go for it and hope for the best ! Probably not the greatest of ideas.

I guess it’s alright to do this as a digi paint for the scene we’ve been to in Visual Design, but when we have to create something from scratch ill have to do more research and development.

So what exactly is concept art ? well it’s defined as an idea, plan or an intention. It generally shapes the appearance of the game. Certain messages are conveyed in concept art through, use of colour and different tones used effectively convey an atmosphere or mood. For example you wouldn’t use bright primary colours if you wanted to create a post-apocalyptic landscape. Bit of an extreme example, but an example none the less.

viewpoints on the scene also depict and idea of what is happening. If something is needed to be portrayed as dominant & powerful then a low angle will be used. Looking up makes the viewer feel small compared to what is in front of them.

I think the concept art from Guild Wars 2 is stunning. LOOK AT IT, ITS SO BEAUTIFUL !!! I mean, from these images I can really tell that guild wars 2 will be really good ?

I really don’t know, never actually been a fan of the game, only heard good things though.

All the artwork carries a similar rolling theme. When immediately seeing a paint, the colour palet appears very simple, using just 2 colours accompanied with shadows and highlights.

Particularly in this piece where a strong sense of orange and blue are used. This also helps to separate up the image, using orange in the foreground and blue on the crane in the middle to identify different points of interest. 

One thing I noticed is that all of the painting has a strong light source, throughout the paintings there is always a strong contrast between light and dark .

Keeping the concept art in a similar theme and style helps to shape the game and ultimately giving it its unique appearance.

So yeah planning and concept art, its ruddy important !

Reflection of the first year & ambitions for the second

So taking another look back at the first year im pretty sure my opinion of it is still the same. I smoked too much weed and just didn’t do any work. Looking back it was really stupid risking not getting through the first year.

I did some work that I was proud of, the traditional masters study of Peter Howsons work and my version of my face done as a digital painting were probably my favourite pieces of work from visual design.

I aim to be awesome at digital painting by the end of this term. Its something id really like to do, just turns out I’m not very good at it atm. Practise practise practise

This year I’ve decided to structure/sort my life out. No more time wasting spending hours literally doing nothing. Spend my time wisely so I can relax occasionally.

I was terrible at 3dsmax at the start of the year. None of the program made sense to me. Once I thought I had modelling sorted we’d start texturing giving me something else to fail at. It wasn’t until the van project where I really started to know what was going on.

Planar unwrapping ftw – my favourite and worst part of 3dsmax.

My work majorly improved as time went on. It seemed that after every hand in id learnt a new revolutionary technique, or just generally improved my skills in certain areas. My best piece of work would have to be the summer project (im counting that as first year)but literally because it was the most recent thing I made, therefore the best ? plus motorbikes are awesome.

There’s still so much more I can learn from 3dsmax, I’m guessing I’ve barely scratched the surface of what this program has to offer. Hopefully over the next couple of years ill explore more of the software. Maybe just go mad and use every single modifier and texture space.

Actually looking forward to it, particularly using Zbrush. I dunno, It just looks interesting sculpting and painting over something you’ve already made.

I’m still abit foggy about how environments are made. Specially in games like Battlefield with HUUUGE maps. Are they all made with autodesk or another program ? something like the level editor in FarCry 2, that was fun

I feel (as if i) need to start thinking about what I want to do as my final major project. I remember (you, my only folower haha) Mike saying that the best idea is to choose what you want to do rather than what you find easiest.

Makes sense

I know designing characters would be cool but I’m not thaaat interested in that, 1 down. I find environments pretty daunting but that’s because we haven’t had much any experience with them yet. I’m actually a little surprised that so far none of the projects have had anything to do with them.

not even like a little scene or something

at this moment in time im sold on vehicles, but im unsure whether this is because I find them the easiest. I guess theres still plentyyy of time to decide what I want to do.

FREE CHAIRS ! ! ! !

Were given out today at the Newalk Dinosaur museum. Which I honestly found quite amazing, more so actually than the fossils themselves. Who woulda thought ?

Despite the initial joy of FREE CHAIRS, after about 10 minutes of drawing I hadn’t realised my leg had completely fallen asleep and I so very almost collapsed when I tried to stand up.

I looked a fool.

The museum was pretty interesting, but there was a lot of background noise. Forgot how large quantities of small children can be so annoying. For some reason, It being half term and all, parents take their kids to museums. Which meant it was super busy with over excited kids running around everywhere screaming (and learning )

The security guard didn’t look too impressed either when about 30 Game Art students strolled into the gallery setting up chairs all around the exhibits. He threw a bit of a hissy fit ( not really ) and we had to split into two groups, half downstairs drawing stuffed animals and the other upstairs drawing dried up fossils.

Loughborough

So this time I actually made it to the right station *pats self on back. This was right up my street, definitely enjoy drawing bits of machinery and mechanical bits and bobs over natural things. There was a such a diverse variety of things to draw so I could happily spend the day with my head in my sketchbook. I was blessed with the weather providing a lovely day of drawing.

All the staff were surprisingly nice as well. An old man approached me and asked if I wanted to see inside the shed

Bit dodgy ?

He said put a pound in the box and you can stroll round providing you stick to the paths. Inside were lots of machinery so I guess the shed was where the mechanics repair old engines and such. I also got some nice pictures from inside there which was quite a bonus *upload to flickr.

So yeah, great central railway IN Loughborough, MUCH better than Loughborough Train Station.

What A Waste of A Day

This weeks visual design task - trip to Loughborough Station.

But apparently Loughborough Station and The Great Railway Station IN Loughborough are two different places.

Well me and Steve where un-aware of this and ended up spending the day at a standard National Rail train service platform. I did think at the time that, suuuuurely we not meant to be drawing this place, there’s like, nothing here ! Turns out we had to take a 20 minute walk to find our actual destination.

It wasn’t until labs yesterday we’d realised the error in our ways. We were just casually talking to fellow Game Art people when we were like

We didn’t see any of you guys at the station yesterday

Really, we were there all day

Loughborough Station right ?

Yeah, with all the old trains

Then it started to click that maybe we’d gone to the wrong place. Everyone found this highly amusing. I was already upset about paying money for a train fare, but now I’ve got to pay ANOTHER £4.80 to hopefully not make the same mistake twice.

Back to School

It’s the start to a new year back on Game Art Design, which means a fresh start to the course where this year, I AM going to change my ways, complete all the work on schedule and not let it all build up putting me under extreme pressure and stress.

So far so good, judging from the first week anyway.. Actually went to all the lectures, which imho is quite an achievement in itself. After the trip to Abbey Park I managed to get the majority of the prep sketches done so I could swiftly focus on other areas. Chris wanted us to start using colour in our work so I took a trip to Dominos toy shop and invested in the cheapest pack of acrylic paints I could find ( poor student )

These are 3 attempted paints. Honestly… they’re not great. I just can’t paint for shit ( despite having an A level in Art ) I guess the theory is the more I do it the better I’ll get. So I’m not going to give up and just persevere through until I reach a marvellous breakthrough. The same kinda thing happened which 3dsmax. I noticed however my painting skills improved which each attempt.

TREASURE CHEST!!!

Is the name of the next 3dsmax task. Out of the 3 tasks ( Chest, Trash and our face ) the chest is the one I’m least excited about doing. Not completely sure why this is, maybe just because we’re all making the same thing and there’s not that much room for variety ?

Yeah I think that might be it.

Heather wanted us to personalize them, but at the moment im not completely sure how im going to go about this. So far I’ve made most of the chest and I just have to add the final details. Ive got plenty of tris left to do this so there won’t be any issues there. The only thing holding me back appears to be my imagination.

I struggled at the start making the chest, working from a single perspective reference was quite a challenge. My main issue was that I couldn’t figure out how the legs were meant to fit around the body of the chest. It was all mighty confusing, but after playing with the geometry for a while I finally figured it out. Yay.

I aim to completely finish the modelling by the end of the second weeks game production session, fully unwarp and maybe even start a bit of cheeky texturing as well. Ambitious.

I’m a little bit worried about texturing as it all has to be hand painted, and my digital painting skills aren’t really that great. My tablet has appeared to have fucked up overnight and isn’t recognizing the pen pressure which is a bit of a bummer. Will have to get this sorted out or most likely use the tablets in the labs.

Summer Project

Well first off I’m just gonna say I really should’ve kept up with my blog over the summer holidays, its going to be weird having to get used to talking to myself again, oh the joys of blog writing.

So… the Summer Project – the choice between an environment, vehicle, character or animal. I thought I’d go down the vehicle route. From here it was a tough decision what to model, but I wanted to create something from a 3d reference which I could see fully before my eyes.

So I went to various arts crafts and toy shops (Toys ‘R’ us bringing back so many childhood nostalgic memories, was so tempted to roll round the store in their electronic cars, but turns out they don’t leave batteries in them anymore ! how sad) anyways, I was trying to find an airfix kit which I could work from. Ideally I wanted to make a motorcycle, and eventually I found one, the Honda CBR 1100xx… Perfect !

It’s also like the daddy version of my CBR 125R back at home haha.

Making it was fun, it’s been a while since I sat down with the smell of glue sticking tiny bits of plastic together. But after a couple of days the model was finished and it was time to restart max and create the bike in the virtual world !

My first attempt was rather shabby, I started off modelling the side fairing but not really thinking about what I was doing. After a while though I decided it wasn’t working out and it was time to start again.

After this it went surprisingly smoothly creating the geometry ( I was actually thinking about what I was doing ) I think having the Model Airfix kit in front of me really helped as I could really see the curves and shapes on the bike and I was able to covert this into 3dsmax. I had the hardest time making the fuel tank, for a while I couldn’t get the right shape and when it did, it wouldn’t fit onto the bike correctly. Eventually though I got this sorted out.

I am pleased with the final outcome. The bike resembles the real thing and I also explored new techniques within texturing such as reflective maps to make the model nice and shiny. however there are small details which I didn’t manage to create within the tri budget, which I would’ve liked to have included. The wheels could also do with a higher use of polys, looks uncomfortable to ride in the real world !

Wheelie Bin Re-do

So I randomly decided to do the second week project again, seeing as my previous efforts were somewhat poor due to my skills at 3ds max. Shoddy modelling and an inability to texture properly lead this project looking like fail.

So heres a new version of the project, this time knowing how to use max, bin fully unwrapped & textured and I did all in 4 hours or so compared to the weeks we were allotted for this talk.

This bin is modelled much more efficiently using 598 tris out of the 600 allowed for the ‘low poly bin’ My original version was actually over 1700 tris, don’t exactly how I managed that as the geometry wasn’t even that complicated, probably just wasted tris all over the place.

I think a lot of them came from extreme chamfering everywhere to make courners look smooth, but at the time I didn’t know that proper use of smoothing groups can have the same effect and use less tris.

I guess it wasn’t expected to be amazing first time round after a few weeks lessons, but I really had no idea when we were doing this project. I remember being surprised at the time that it resembled a bin!

The texturing could be better on the new version tbh, its all hand painted as I lost my reference photos, didn’t spend that long painting it, because I got bored of doing a project id already done before haha