Monday 28 November 2011

Leicester Centre Final

My god, i have never spent so long doing a painting, this literally took me 7/8 hours, wtf. I think i'm going to do some prep sketches on Photoshop, and not care about intricate details. Mega happy with it though, i should be for the amount of time i pumped into it. Also had a little go on the cintiq's in the labs today, took a little while getting used to the fact  you have to work crouching over a little and i tiny bit of lag you tend not to notice with tablets. But they were brilliant.

Monday 21 November 2011

War of the worlds orthos



Orthographic Tripod Standing an impressive 225 ft above the ground and equaling most buildings in stature. The alien war machine is a formidable and large enemy. It is a  living and breathing machine with organs and lungs, but is nearly indestructible from the outside. It releases a outstanding amount of heat which is funneled through the exhaust in the back. This vaporizes all waste material that it consumes and jettisons it into the atmosphere, whilst sucking in more air to breath. It carry's a asortment of weaponry including its size, such as the tentacle like limbs extruding its underbelly. These fire a deadly heat ray and are used to snatch helpless victims from the ground.

Wednesday 16 November 2011

Abbey Park

Abbey Park Final, looks a tad to saturated by hey its autumn, spent a good 4 1/2 hours on this, i'm try desperately to speed up, i'm not overly happy with this, but hey got to post something, enjoys.

Tuesday 15 November 2011

Bradgate Park Final

Its early in the morning but i got it done, spent around 6 hours on this but i'm happy with how it turned out so mohwell.

Monday 14 November 2011

Work Updates


Some war of the worlds tripod designs that i knocked up in about 20minutes, the lecture we had with Mitch Small ( A concept artist previously on the course ) really helped me speed up the way in which i worked. I am still no where near as fast as he was, but knocking up thumbnails that are just for reference is a damn sight easier now. Try to just jot down forms and shapes rather than obsess about small details when in reality i will only chose 1 of these designs as my final outcome. You heard it boys and girls, don't take your work to heart you'll just get hurt. Still enjoyed doing these though.



Marmoset is a gem of a renderer, and its a engine so it give a better idea of how your object will look in a functioning game. I'll probably post a more in depth review of my game design projects as they progress and once I've completed the other tasks. By here it is in its relative beauty.







Sunday 13 November 2011

Planning & Concepting in Game Design

Although i left this blog a little late i feel that i have benefited by the lecture that Mitch Small gave us the other day on concepting, so hear it goes.
Concepting isn't just important to the fundamental stages of game design, it is an integral part of every design process at every stage of completion. It helps artist work in a particular style and helps the final assets of a game be more similar in design to each other, by given them examples of design, architecture and color. From producing hundreds of prep sketches for every character, object, color pallet, scene and vehicle; this helps the design team pick through hundreds of designs and find interesting aspects in only a short amount of time. Ultimately saving the company money and you a lot of precious time and  a lot of feelings that would otherwise be shattered. For instance, if you had spent a lot of time polishing just one drawing that wasn't picked for the final game. Mitch made it perfectly clear that becoming attached to your work wasn't a options, as ultimately the design team would probably just disregard it. Spending a long time producing a spectacular painting that wasn't what they wanted was a waste, so producing pages of silhouettes first and refining these as they picked designs they liked is a much more efficient way of working. This will ultimately save time, money and positively effect your pay packet.
Once a few ideas have been thought of, and critiqued, they can be refined so that more detailed iterations are produced in numerous different designs. This level of escalation is important in producing workable material for games and what ever other project you may be working on. By producing visual material, you are producing reference which every other member of the company can use.
Every design process is a type of concepting, it involves thinking of an idea and producing iterations of this in till a final idea and process has been produced. Often it is important not to think of your idea, just focus on the outline and shapes that composes your ideas. This free form expression benefits your work as it encourages you to produce work you wouldn't necessarily think of. Even if your doodling ideas, there should still be a purpose behind this, it should benefit you towards your project.
To concept effectively, you need to be shit hot at organisation. We've already established that concepting isn't just pretty pictures, it's not even producing an endless stream of thumbnails. It requires a wealth of information and reference, which also requires a very effective file system. Imagine trying to find a picture file that wasn't named and lost in a sea of other files. It would be pretty impossible to quickly produce work, which would intern slow the entire project down and you would get fired and die..maybe..probably not. In essence concepting is planning and planning are organised tasks that will help you concept. With the right information and planning, you know your constraints and what you need to do by when. Get it?
In conclusion, concepting isn't just the fancy images you see in Imagine FX, in fact its about 1% of it, concepting is designing world constraints and reference material, that the rest of your company can work with to produce a brilliant game that ties in together. If it requires 60 5 minutes drawings of a character to get them right wouldn't it be better than a 2 hour painting that isn't at all what the producers want, and is effectively a very expensive waste of time.

Monday 7 November 2011

Loughbrough

My Loughbrough Final, i did this earlier in the year, but it wasn't till today that i put any detail on it, i think it turned out pretty well in the end.