Tuesday 29 March 2011



Hot Sauce Bottle Paint
Was trying to pick up speed whilst retaining detail, still took me way to long, a few hours behind this one, I need to work on my ellipses but i guess thats what practice is for.

Walther PPK 700tri model for game production, crazy ass render but still trying out new stuff in Max.


Thursday 24 March 2011

Life Drawing

Life Drawing

Life Drawing

Life Drawing

Life Drawing

Life Drawing

Pumping Station WIP

Masters Self Portrait

Friday 18 March 2011

Character/s?

Character shouldn’t be confused with characters however the two are interlinked. Character to an environment, story, characters, or anything that appears in a game is necessary. As without it we find it hard to believe what we are seeing. Character is important as it put a story and reasoning behind what we find and see in a game. It makes the player more submerged in the game and less disconnected from what they are playing if they understand how they got here and why they are doing what they’re doing. Games developers are quickly realising that increased hardware power, mindless gameplay and graphical stimuli will not hold the players interest for long, and in order to attract a wider market audience away from the hard core gamers an interesting story and narrative will be able to attract additional buyers.
Characters however are important in games as they generate emotional attachments, are interesting and ultimately allow you to take part in a games story. Without some sort of emotional attachment, relation or interest characters are dull, boring and distract the user from the key aspects of game. An effective character can persuade a player to invest more playing time, purchase more games and can spin off a whole world of different money making options for a company. An effective back story allows for the user to feel compassionate or resentful of a character and without this sort of planning and background story writing characters are flat and the story and gameplay is directly affected.  Characters need to be individuals as much as people in real life and need to have there own motives, reasoning and goals.
Characters are normally the archetype; a character is either a hero/heroine. Although they might be a bad character they are still a character that is ultimately respected within a story.  This doesn’t change much when looking from game to game and this is the basic for creating the majority of artistic pieces. Even if the character is supposed to be an everyday character the player still makes them a lot more capable that what they would otherwise be in real life. A script is important when building a character as this gives the player more insight into how they might be, feel and react to the surrounding area. However without proper character development and conception of a script can feel disjointed. Acting allows for the character to become more real as an actor uses his talents to create a persona for them. Having someone use their voice gives feeling to a character and is important to create this sense of presence and profound importance that makes characters so wonderful to look at. Appearance can tie in with art direction, without having a direction for the character the realism or more likely relation of character traits won’t work and you will not have succeeded in creating interesting characters.
Personally I find Sci-Fi and Alternate History/Futurism fascinating to look at, as this allows so many options when creating a story. Not that I don’t find Fictional stories interesting but I feel that Non-fictional stories allow for such a greater depth to storytelling as if done correctly a world different from what we are living in is so much more intriguing to learn about.  I find the halo stories particularly interesting as with the development of the games they also released a series of books that give you more insight into the world and time that they are set and because these stories are following a ultimate style guide and guru they work amazingly as interlinking pieces of work and do brilliantly at developing characters that you have and haven’t already met. I feel games need to try and develop this more as ideas that are backed up with stories and characters that have been thoroughly thought through and ultimately a lot more believable. I would thoroughly recommend the entire halo book series as they are wonderfully written and give great insight into characters and why they are important in any creative situation.

Art Direction

Art Direction is the process of choosing what sort of mood, feeling and consistency is applied to anything creative.  An Art Director in general directs the vision of a project and the overall appearance of everything in the project. Although they do not necessarily produce the assets directly there influence is key to generating a consistent project and artistic style.  Particular care must be taken to ensure each artist work is interlink able and that they understand what is need to produce concise and useable material within a game. By planning the art direction with the help of concept artists and story boarding an art director can lay out a clear platform on which artists can add appropriate work that will result in a successfully designed and implemented game.
Art Directors are important in developing games because without them the art team and the rest of the development team wouldn’t have set art direction and goals to achieve. This would result in the project being held up and the final outcome not being fluent in design.  Artists are inherently creative and without design constraints this tends to result in them producing work that isn’t consistent and this will affect the end game and people’s opinion of it.
Art directors are responsible for a team as much as any director and have to manage their staff and what they are focused upon.  I feel that being an Art Director may be the most creative position in the art department. It is definitely the most responsible art position, as entire project are reliant on their decisions. If an Art Director doesn’t make sound decisions or creative ones then a project can be unsuccessful and in the worst case scenario a developer can’t go under. So I feel that Art Directors are creative, if not the most creative members of a team, or at least those who make the most important decisions. Generally speaking Art Directors have a great deal of experience in industry or a creative background of many years. So assuming that they have worked from the bottom they have lots of experience and know how to make good creative decisions.
Art Directors in Games aren’t particularly different from those in films, because they are still relied upon to make important artistic decisions and directions; I feel that important qualities that someone needs in order to become an art director are some degree of experience. This could be in are position within the games industry for some period of time. It is important for the person to have some interpersonal skills as they have to lead a team and those who are used to working in a team are obviously going to have some of these traits. They could have been an art director in another creative industry as essential these skills are interchangeable and they would still apply to this position. Being able to control and stich together information and choosing appropriate art direction would also be necessary. Essentially practice and success would be necessary traits to become an Art Director.