Monday, 18 April 2011
Pumping Station Final
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
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.
Thursday, 17 February 2011
Game Design; Add 1 milli0ns en3m1es and expl0sion all tiem, plzlzzllz
Frankly people have an absurd notion to want and expect ridiculous amounts of everything in a game no matter what you deliver. Game developers will always be just under the bar for an acceptable level of detail in a game. It will be your personal problem and all the internet will be spamming you with how
you’ve ruined their favourite game, or made a game that’s sh*t and go jump of a bridge and die. Hmm?
Well the truth is everyone thinks it, including me that most games have missed the mark when it comes to being great. They could all offer so much more to the playing field. Or if a developer actually does get a game right, they butchered the sequel with things that have ruined what they’ve become so accustomed too. Well I did think that too a certain degree, in till I joined the course and realised that games do have realistic boundaries that they have to fall within. Blindingly obvious but overlooked. Developers are in a constant battle to reach equilibrium of having the awesome lipsmackingly good features vs. time vs. space vs. the people.
Every game has something that doesn’t make it too the final print, in fact the majority of what they set out to achieve will be redesign, reworked or removed entirely in order to actually make a functional game. If a developer set out to achieve all of its goals it wouldn’t succeed in making a profit or even realising the game in the first place. The process of making a game is trying to balance the key concepts and ideas and making them work in a very constricted way that will ultimately make the publisher money. It must be very degrading seeing people destroy the work that you spent two years making as good as it can be in the time and space given.
Of course not all games released are actually good. There are exceptions where the developer could have been a lot more efficient or could have picked a completely different and much better direction. But the majority of the time when people dislike a game, it’s because there not used to it, it’s changed, or it isn’t as long or as complex as the consumer wants it to be. People are generally picky and hate change that they don’t agree with. The reasons why this happens are because games development is driven on profit, the people making it want to be innovative and more efficient and those playing it want it to be beyond the limitations that it can. Frankly these ideas cannot work together.
An idea is crafted by management and directors rather than from what the people want. In order to make a successful games title, you need a great simple idea, a fast and very efficient team, a reasonable time scale and put a lot of hours into it. Actually moderation, actually just copy call of duty that seems to work well. You’ll never conquer 100% of the market share but develop a game that’s simple exciting, fun and put a lot of hours behind it and you can do pretty damn well. There is no “Game Designer” instead an idea that is given more and more focused direction in till it becomes the finished title. Working with entire team based on this original design. It’s very important that the original idea that’s drafted is expanded and crafted into a vast resource that will allow all the members of the team to adhere too and for the game to have a set direction. E.g. a Design Document. It will allow the money to continue to flow in from the publisher and for the people in your team to have enough information to get on with what they need to do without constant referral.
Update
It’s been a while since i last posted anything to the blog, the task are under way but i thought i would just tell the world what's been happening with me. First of all the end of the transit project just passed, i was pretty impressed with my time management being that it was the first time that i had time to spare on a modelling project. The end results too, were effective and i can personally see that i have made improvements too my modelling. Mesh flow seems to be very important and with help from Mike I’ve really found a fondness to scrutinise every detail, I’m happy with it and there are a lot of things that I have learnt that will be useful on future modelling tasks.
The next task is the gladiator project, again we have roughly 4 weeks to produce a final model, however considering character building, drawing and in general are my weakest subject this should be a challenge. I’m really aiming to be super-efficient with my base model so that I can maximise the detail I can put into the character and he’s affects. Yesterday, about half way through modelling the face I learned that loops are very important in faces allowing expressions and deformations to occur so this is my personal target for this project, so that I understand how a body deforms so that I have better understanding of mesh flow and rigging. Oh we also have to rig..Yay?
Yeah I know they don’t look the same yet, I have a lot less to work with, also as aforementioned I suck at people. I need to add in some more loops around the mouth and curvature around the eyes and nose. It will look better, promise.
Life drawings getting better, I seem to picking it up again after a substantial break what did I expect? I’m using a lot more vertical lines when it comes to shading and this really helps when it comes to facial rendering. That’s my update. Byes.
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