Speeding Through It All

Whenever I do a speedpaint post I think to myself "Well, I only have 4 or 5 images to show, how long could writing that take?" and then I actually go an look and it's more like 6 to 8 images, so it's going to take longer than I thought.  6 to 8 isn't bad going, especially since it feels like I've barely set aside any time for them recently.  And I really haven't - most of these are very, very quick studies, for various reasons.

I still have a lot on my plate  over the next few weeks, but it's not always easy to find the time in between my day job, and the stuff I do for Dr. Sandifer.  Last week, as an example, I was working on an image for work in my spare time. It wasn't an official image, but I needed to demonstrate something at a presentation, and didn't have time to both write the presentation and do the artwork without working on it at home.  No, you can't see it, at least not yet.  Maybe one day, when what it refers to is no longer under wraps.

SO yeah, I've been falling behind on my art practice, and I'm honestly at a bit of a loss to where all the time goes, but it does go, and it goes fast.   Speaking of fast...

Time Taken: 35 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC

 So I spent a while messing around with brushes and the new color picker I have for Photoshop.  This started in the last speed post, as you may or may not remember, but I carried on with that theme for a bit.  This is just a simple greyscale sketch with no reference used.  Not very exciting, but there's something I like about it anyway.  I painted the background with a fairly random brush, and then filled in the details with a more detailed one, basing those details on the shapes formed with the big random one.

Time Taken: 5 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC

This might be the shortest paint I've ever done.  I was mucking around with brushes, did a scribble with this one, and could basically see this on the screen.  All I had to do was fill in the other tones.  Once I'd done that he looked Native American (or American Indian if you prefer, I know there's some contention over that), so I sketched in the feathers.  I quite like it, even if it is pretty rough.

Time Taken: 45 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC

I feel bad about this, as I often do when I can't give an original source for an images reference, but I liked the photo and painted it because I was in the mood, and only discovered I couldn't find the credits after the fact.  Yes, I'm a terrible person, and no, a reverse image search didn't help much.  If you know who's photo this is, or who the subject is then let me know and I'll credit them properly, but until then, you can find the original here.  Very poor show on my part, especially so as it's one of two images with this issue this post.

Still, this was more messing about with Photoshop. In this case I went ahead and used the Gaussian Blur filter, because why not? And it gave the picture a nice depth that I wouldn't otherwise know how to achieve (not without spending longer on it than intended anyway).  After that I threw in two layers, one for the quick layout, and one for the actual painting.  I didn't add any additional layers after that, and when I was done I turned off the sketch layer.   Nothing too taxing, and I'm not a huge fan of the result, but I've done a lot worse.  Nothing too fancy about the method of painting; I picked colours and painted them - I really wasn't thinking about this one terribly hard, which made for a relaxing paint even if not the best result.

Time Taken: 65 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC

More brush tests.  This time a spiky one, a noisy one, a flat one and a cloudy one.  I don't much like the results here, but I'd honestly be hard pressed to tell you why.  Is it the colour range (which I'm pretty sure is way off the source photograph, which was my own), or bad perspective, or what?  I think I need more practice on environmental paintings.  The clouds came out well though.  I like that cloud brush; I think it will prove very useful on occasion.

Time Taken: 90 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC

Used another filter on this one, right at the end.  Ran sharpen on it and liked the result, so I left it.  This one is the other one with no direct credit.   Image search returns a Japanese term that apparently means Personality Hairstyles, which doesn't help much.  The original is tucked away here, but again I will gladly give credit where it's due.

So I quite like this one.  Again it was the result of mucking around with brushes, but I like the result.  For all that though it's a little embarrassing looking at the stages picture here because I didn't notice until quite late that I'd put her eye in completely the wrong place.  When I finally did notice it didn't take long at all to move it to a better location, but it does look a bit strange.  My original intention was to paint the whole thing with the spiky brush you can see I've used in the first stage, but I quickly realised that that was going to look awful, so I switched to a more traditional one for the rest of the painting.  I picked this one because I really like the graphic nature of her shirt,  I'd be tempted to make a more finished piece out of it if I had any idea who to give the original credits too.  Maybe I'll just do something unrelated, but use this as inspiration.

Time Taken: 25 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC
Are you bored with these quick Photoshop brush tests yet?  Well, the good news is that the next one is in ArtRage.  This one is a wolf - hopefully that's self evident, but maybe not.  All done using one brush type (it's the spiky one again, only really big), and black and white.  There's not much else to say about it, I just let the brush do most of the work to be honest.  Yes, I had to provide some guidance, but it's the brush that provided the nice sketchy finish.

Time Taken: 90 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4

After all that I needed a break from Photoshop (though I did convince myself that I might be able to do a finished piece in it at some point), and went back to ArtRage.  This piece is based on 'David 12' by faestock.  I liked the expression.  I wish I could tell you more than that, but I just fell into my old speedpaint habits for the most part.

Oh, and I cheated, sort of.  You can see there are some marks on the step by step stages above that disappear at the end; two on the right, and one in the middle at the top.  That's my "grid".  It's not much of a grid, especially since I eyeballed it, but it did help a lot with getting the layout worked out, so I may be doing that again.

Since it was done in ArtRage, and because I remembered before closing it, I managed to record a timelapse from my undo stages.  It's a bit jumpy right at the beginning, but it settles down before I paint the portrait proper.  You can even see me add those marks.

There you go, 7 paints for the price of 4.  I'll be back again as soon as I get time, but until then, arrivederci.

Robots Under Pressure

It's been a slightly packed couple of weeks.  It was my Son's birthday yesterday, and that will be the focus of this post (completely skipping over two other things I need to blog about, not including the sketching posts I have still failed to get to). The day before I had an important presentation at work (I wasn't doing the presenting, but it was my work - along with others - being presented, if that makes sense), and that might eventually be the focus of a post in about 5 years time.  Anyway, those two things were a day apart, and I was given the task for each of them a day apart as well, about 2 and a half weeks ago.

For work it was that I'd taken a screenshot of something from just the right angle that it looked good, and it was suggested that it be shown off at this presentation. Except not a still shot from just that angle.  What I was working on was in no-way ready to be presented in that way, but I said sure anyway, and then set out to make sure it wasn't horrible.  It was more work than I'd anticipated, but such is life.  I can't go into any additional detail, except that getting it to a state I was (fairly) happy to show took late nights and last weekend. This is not a complaint - it's just something that goes along with the job sometimes.  On it's own, not a big deal.

The day after this came up my wife suggested I do something for my Son's birthday.  He's been on a kick to get a picture of a Cute Robot for a while, and she's been looking at pictures on Etsy and such.  I'm generally loath to buy something I could do just as well myself (which isn't much to be honest), so she said "well, why don't you do one...  Or more?"  We ended up deciding on 7. She said 4 to 6, and I pointed out that since he was turning 7 it should be 7.  You may note there are only 6 below - explanation to follow.

Click to enlarge images, as usual.

Anyway, I had no idea if I could even do them since it's not like I have a history of drawing cute Robots.  Clearly I could do it to a degree, you can see the results above, but 2 weeks ago I had no clue, so I got to sketching to find out.

I sketched in the evening for a couple of days, and came up with a bunch of robots of slightly varying styles.  Mostly I was going for the classic cute robot vibe of the 50's, but there's some slightly different stuff in there too.  They weren't drawn in as orderly a manner as this obviously - They're scattered around about 4 sketchbook pages in all sorts of orientations - I've just laid them out like this here for easy viewing.

I had one rule when sketching - I could look at all the robots and reference I wanted until I actually picked up a pencil, at which point other Robots were off the table for reference.  Everything else was fair game though - the Robot with the wings was based on a squirt bottle for example.  The animals in the lower right were from reference, and I drew them in order to have something else to place in an image if I needed to. Just as well I did as my wife wasn't keen on the wet tiger, so he got switched to a cute baby penguin instead.

That tiger pic may get done yet though - cats and Robots seems to be pretty common (as do robots with hearts and robots with balloons - these are all cliche stacked to the heavens), so I thought it would be funny if it was a tiger instead.  I mean what's a tiger going to do to a robot?  Behave more or less like a regular cat to a human is my guess.  I think it's sweet, so I may use the idea at some point in the future one way or another.  That Robot with the leash and umbrella is based on a Davy Lamp we have by the way.

After sketching I did a mockup of how the finals might look.  This was for two reasons; firstly I wanted to make sure the idea might actually work when done on toned paper, and secondly I wondered how difficult it would be to hack something together if it turned out I sucked at drawing them for real (did I not mention that - those are all physical, not digital pieces, except for this mockup).  Turned out okay, but I figured I'd have to do more work on them than this if I did them digitally.

My wife had picked out her nine favourites at this point, and had the list ordered.  I had a choice of ways to transfer them from sketches to final 8x10 images,  and eventually settled on scanning them, blowing up the size with a printer and then tracing that over to the final paper as a guide.  Other options were using a grid (pain in the arse to erase when finished), or just re-sketching at a larger scale (too much potential for mistakes, and thus wasting my nice toned paper).

Above is the one of the seven I didn't get to because on the last day before his birthday my son had a large tantrum and put me right off bothering with it.  I did tell him he can have another if he can be good for the rest of the week, so this one may eventually see charcoal.  You can see that in this case I did resketch parts of it (on sketch paper) because I wasn't terribly happy with his head.  I also swapped out the balloon for the butterfly since two balloon robots is overkill.  I then gave the other Robot this one's heart balloon.  These got printed on regular printer paper.  I flipped some of them - this was to make tracing easier in some cases, in others it was to actually flip the result when I inked it.

And here I am drawing one of them (I adjusted the contrast on the middle image so you could see the lines after tracing - they're practically invisible otherwise).  Pretty simple setup - Traced the printed blowup on tracing paper, taped the tracing paper to the toned paper, rubbed the graphite from the tracing paper onto the toned and then proceeded to ink it (with a sharpie fine liner, although I switched to a thicker marker for Robin just to mix things up a little).  I used two shades of grey and black Prismacolor markers for large areas of tone, and then white and black charoal for the shading, except for a white gel pen for the strongest highlights.   Colour was added using Prismacolor pencils, and the penguin was filled white with a white paint marker.

Other than the borders I didn't use a ruler for any of them - I'm quite pleased about that. Each one took between 90 minutes and two hours, so not an insignificant amount of time given what else was going on - and in addition to the work thing I slipped on some ice (no major damage, just aches), got (and have) some tinnitus in my right ear, my wife's car broke down, and we suffered another bereavement just as I was beginning (we were no longer close, but I had a great deal of respect for them back when we saw each other regularly).

The only downer with the actual art was the one with the two robots holding hands ("Heart")- My fixative spray for the charcoal decided to spit all over that one, and left a stain.  It's actually a cool effect - but I would have planned something for it if I'd known in advance...

And that's that.  Me and my wife framed them, and they're ready to go on his wall.

I don't usually do this, but if you want to see them larger (and in the unlikely event you want to order prints), you can see them over on my Deviant Art page with the following links:

Balloon
Penguin
Oil
Sunflower
Heart
Robin

So, what do you think?  Did I do an okay job on these retro bots? I would not rule out doing more in the future, but it isn't currently planned beyond the possible 7th for my son.   I'll update here if that one does happen I guess.

Sketching for July/September '13

With over a month since my last post, you'd think I'd have lots to show.  You would be wrong.  It's not that I've not been active (though I've not produced anywhere near what I should have - almost no speed paints for example), just that much of that I either can't show, or can't show just yet.  Mostly though this month (and the end of the last) has just been a fairly tough slog.  Long time followers will know that October 5th marks an unhappy anniversary for me, and  as such the two weeks around that date are usually a pretty horrible time for me emotionally.   This year though I also had two friends pass away in the time since I last posted.  The latter was very close, and died on Thursday.   I won't post my thoughts on that here - it's best left to other places, but obviously it's affected me deeply.

But on to happier things, at least for this post.  We've had a house guest for a few weeks, and he's likely to be around for a while longer.  While his presence is obviously a minor distraction from the art thing he's also the model guest, and we're very happy to have him. I do also have some things coming up soon - I'm taking a new painting class, and I'll be posting the results before long.  One of the pieces seems to be fairly popular, (though of course, being me I can't see why) and overall there should be three or four paintings by the end of it.  I've also been working on a new book cover for Dr. Sandifer, and that should be hitting the electronic store shelves in the next few weeks - I'll have a post about it ready when it does of course.  There are also another two covers that are essentially done, and just waiting on a final page count.  Those I'll probably blog about in December and January when the books go live.  So yes, things are happening, even if it's not quite in the places I would hope (anatomy practice, sketching, that sort of thing - I've had no mental time for it the past few months, but hopefully that will change soon).  For now though, let's get the sketching up to date...

Two sheets of heads from July through to September.  Varying quality, obviously, although there are a few I'm really pleased with (yes, that's a rarity - mark this date in your diaries).  The profile of the woman (used n the thumbnail of this post) turned out quite nicely, as did the closeup of the eye to her right.  Below the eye is perhaps the best face I've ever drawn while not referring to a photograph - He just looks very natural to me (albeit like Bill Clinton's younger sibling).  On the larger sheet I like the stylization of the chap in the top left, and the expression of the girl below him.  The arm of the girl to their right turned out okay too.  I've also put a little work into drawing some more diverse ethnicities.  Hopefully that's apparent here.

And here are some figure based sketches. I like bits of many of them, but almost none of them as a whole. I still have a long way to go with this stuff evidently.

And there you have it - Not a lot to be going on with, but it won't be over a month until I post again, so there's more to come fairly soon.

Sketching for August (and the OAG)

Well, yeah. So I haven't been posting much in the past few months as you may have noticed. This isn't because I don't like posting (although prepping these sketch posts can be a real drag), more it's with me just not having much to post.

August was an especially dry month, it seemed to go by extremely quickly and I didn't do much in the way of sketching; I thought - Turned out I did more than I expected, just not the usual stuff, but more on that in a minute. I had promised another post last month, but in the end I felt that the contents of that were better blended with my regular sketch posts - the aims are similar even though the results are less exciting.

You'll notice some changes this time around - they may stay, they may not. Only time will tell. Oh, The ORG? Read on MacDuff!

Sketch Practice

So the most obvious change is that I've switched from a white background to a noisy grey for the sketches. This is because the new scanner introduces noise I can't fully get rid of without far more cleanup than I'm willing to spend, so the noisy grey hides some of that. Additionally I'll be using white more often than I have previously, and if the background is white you won't be able to see it. It's better than th epink I used to go with though right?

You'll also notice there are only two images (and none of them is the usual "bad" one. Well, I said it was a dry month, so with the exception of a couple of ones that were scribbled so quickly that of course they're bad this is pretty much all I actually did in the traditional manner last month. It's telling that it's now September the 7th, and I've already done half the amount of sketching I did for the whole of last month! So this is pretty much it.

Thankfully (and unusually) I'm pretty happy with most of it. Highlights (for me) are the high-and-tight haired guy in the lower right of the Free Sketch picture along with the three women in a triangle to the center left, also the girl to the left of the figure practice image came out OK.

High and tight looks a little like my cousin (unintentional), while the lass with the Afro was inspired by a girl serving at Little Caesars on the day we got our new cats, but nothing here is drawn from any direct reference.

Open Art Group

I mentioned Focus posts in the last sketching post (without actually explaining it seems), and then didn't post a follow up. Well, this is what it was about; the OAG or Open Art Group, aspects of which I'll be rolling into the regular blog posts where relevant.

Ben, one of the guys I work with (and a ridiculously good artist himself - puts me to shame) came up with the idea about six weeks ago. You have a group that meets once a week that consists of people who want to improve their art. Every other week you have a (fairly vague) Focus for people to work on, and then you all get together the following week and discuss them. Not necessarily critique them, just discuss.

We opened the idea up to the company and got a range of people attending, from our concept artists to programmers who've never held a pencil. It's nice to have such a good spread (amusingly the programmers are the most consistent attendants :))

So, the first focus was "Shapes & simple objects" the second was Gesture Drawing and so on.

For "shapes" I chose circles, and just drew lots of them. This was to loosen up my wrist and get the curved flow going as well as to just improve my circles -apparently this is recommended by Vilppu in a book I have yet to buy (shame on me). Lucky you, you get to see all 15 pages of circles (various media) shrunk down into one big image (click to expand of course).

So I didn't go completely loopy I also did a houshold object (our TV remote - photo for your reference, though it was drawn - badly - from 'life'), and a set of common 3D primitives (I messed up the lighting, though it took Ben to point that out)

The next Focus was Gesture Drawing. You've seen this in the past if you're a long time reader, but I let myself slide doing it, to my detriment it turned out. If you're new the idea is to get the feel and 'gesture' of an image in a short time span. This time it's ten pages condensed into one image. I should point out that reducing the size like this does make some of them look rather better than they did originally. Some of these, even at this size, are standing in for this month's "Bad" image (some are OK though - click to expand).  The time on all of them was one minute per figure and I used a range of media (Charcoal, graphite sticks, pencil, ink brush and Sketch Book Pro)

And that's it. I think part of the reason I did less of my usual sketching last month was because of all the OAG stuff on the side. This is likely to continue to greater or lesser degrees and so I'll continue to include them at the end of regular posts, or even mixed in with them where relevant (there'll be some in the upcoming speedpaints posts for example, as one of the speedpaints was for the OAG).

Let me know what you think of the idea of including the Open Art Group in with the posts if you have any issues (no comments will mean "I don't care it's fine").

Sorry this one was so wordy, the next one will likely be less so.

The Best (Not Worst) Sketching of October

I think by this point we've all acknowledged that I can be pretty tardy when it comes to updating the blog, especially when there are other shiny things I could be looking at/reading/playing/watching etc.  This was definitely the case last month as you'll note the new record low of 1 solitary post.  Bah.  If October felt like an eternity then November offset it by going in a flash.
"Oh look, it's Guy Fawks Nigh*VOOF*t...  I mean Thanksgiving."
Partly this was down to the excitement of having shipped another game, and it being reviewed very well, and also being really really fun to play.  Yes, I've played rather a lot of Saints Row: The Third recently.  I only spent six months of so working on it, but it's hard to miss what I did.
Pretty much every ship in the game is something I built, as are a couple of vehicles. They all got touched by other people after I was done (and quite a few people when I was still making them, for technical aid and so on), but they're still enough of mine that I can point and say "I made that ship!".  Anyway, enough excuses and prattling, I'm a month behind, we stuff to catch up on...

Free Sketching

Click to enlarge of course...

So you should immediately notice something different this time. get used to it for it is the way of the future. Basically, another reason I'd put off writing this post was that I couldn't face another month of organizing all the worst work of the month into an image for people to cringe at, so the showing the bad stuff is gone. Prepping these sketch images for online takes a while at the best of times, and since I'd drawn a ludicrous amount in October, and the usual percentage of it was bad I just couldn't face the workload, so I put it off. Eventually I decided I was never going to get around to doing any of it unless I just got rid of the fat, so it's gone and I'm making this post, so that worked. Showing the bad may come back in the future, but right now I'd rather post something than nothing.

With the bad gone I'm dividing the work up into whatever categories work best for a given month, so these are "free sketching" Which is really just a fancy way of saying "Doodles". No reference, very little planning, just sketching. This is what 90% of my sketching consisted of anyway.

I'm quite pleased with a lot of these, although you'll note the lack of full figures. I'll address that last further down, but there are a handful of them there, and they look reasonable. Of the portraits I'm happiest with the girl who's also the thumbnail for this post. In the main I'm pleased with the expressions I'm starting to improve at, with a range of emotion on display here rather than just flat and dull "waiting for the bus" faces. The princess in the top right has a bit of that, but she's a princess, they're supposed to suppress their emotions for the public. ;) I haven't decided if cat face girl is in Halloween makeup or if she's a hybrid. One is pretty hot, the other pretty scary. I'll let you make up your own minds.

Reference Sketching

Here we have the referenced work - drawn from life or photographs (mostly photographs). Actually I can't recall if I drew Iron-Man from a reference or not - I have no recollection either way. It's too good for me to have made up though so I must have.
The girl on the right was not in fact wearing that cloth, but I liked how it looked when I placed the images, so I left it.
I can't remember what I base some of these things on - they're usually very quick sketches while I wait for the kettle to boil and then I forget about them until it's time to scan them in. Not terribly professional, but am I charging? No I am not. :) The unhappy chap at the bottom is me though, for my facebook profile picture - I may have posted it before. Time I did another I think.

Figure Perspectives

And finally this is what I'm calling Figure Perspectives.  They're not really figure studies since I'm not actually studying anything and the anatomy is weak at best.  What happened was that I finished my old sketchbook and realised looking back through it that the vast majority of my good stuff was heads.  I would quite often draw a half decent head and then decide to continue it only to muff up the perspective and ruin it all.  On top of that my anatomy was middling to poor, so I needed to do something about it.  Back, as the title says, to the drawing board.
So now I'm doing lots of these things.  They're a bit like gesture drawings (that I've posted a few times int he past) but they take longer - the idea is to work on perspective and pose and then work on my anatomy more as I go along, but now with a reasonable grounding in three dimensional space.  After that I can work more on lighting, which I've always been dreadful at.   Anyway, expect to see a few of these from now on.  I'll still be doing portrait sketches, but I need to move my focus if I'm to become more well rounded as an illustrator.

I didn't really do anything else in October, and I did less sketching in November (October was 15 pages of sketching, November only 5 or 6), so I'll get the sketching for November up ASAP.  I did something else in November too, I don't like it as much as I had hoped, but others have said it's petty good, so I'll share that with you soon too.  I've got more game assets to post as well - I'll get around to that eventually.  Fingers crossed that the next couple of months go better than the last couple in terms of updates.  My fingers that is, what you do with yours is your own affair.

All Work and No Play... (RFA Part 2)

Since my last post I've done depressingly little art outside of work, a handful of mediocre sketches (and almost all the sketches were of heads and faces rather than figures) and a rough mockup of a book cover that you won't get to see for a while in case it becomes the cover to an actual book. Other than that I'm sick today, which meant I didn't go to work - this is a shame because I'm rather enjoying what I'm doing at work right now. Since I'm stuck in the house though I'll write a blog post instead.  Lucky you.
As with the last (and probably all future) Work and No Play posts this will consist of an image dump followed by some idle thoughts.  Today I'll be continuing with the work I did for Red Faction: Armageddon, this time focusing on the Marauder vehicles. Clicking the images will make them larger; just like Leon.

Marauder Combat Buggy
Art Directed by Chad Greene & Susan Cenci. Concept by Steve Holt

I don't think I explained the process for these models in the last post, possibly because it wasn't relevant for any of the images; this time it is though. When building a vehicle for RFA two versions were built (more if you take collision into account, but I won't here). The first was a high detail "high-poly" version (poly referring to polygons). This was built to closely follow the concept (although changes were sometimes needed) in as much detail as possible - commonly the number of polygons in these models was in the millions, a far higher number than any game could currently handle. After that a "low-poly" version was built. This fell in the range of a few thousand polygons and was what appeared in the game itself. Polygons used for in-game assets are pretty much always triangles - for the high-poly they could be anything from 3 sided to 10 sided, but are usually 4 sided polygons.

The reason for building the higher detail version was that the detail information can be "baked" into a texture for use in the lower detail version; thus giving the appearance of a much more detailed model. This isn't trade secrets being divulged here; the majority of modern games use much the same technique for their assets, and the techniques can be readily read about on forums and blogs around the internet, but it is worth knowing what "high poly" and "low poly" are actually referring to.

For this version I actually had to build the low poly version twice. The original concept for this vehicle was that you would get to drive it, however it's role was more or less replaced by the Marauder Light Walker (made by Michael Clark) and so the Combat Buggy was relegated to enemy status; when it was realized that the vehicle would not been seen as close up as originally intended I had to build it again with fewer polygons. It appears in two or three areas in the game, but it's sadly easy to miss it as it's usually quite a distance from the camera.

The first two images here show the original version in beauty renders (I don't think I have any screens of the final lower version). It's worth noting that I didn't come up with the green metal used by the Marauders, that was taken from another vehicle - I think in the final game some of the yellow glows were changed to purple too, but this was as it was when I finished with it.

The Third image shows a wireframe of the High-Poly version. None of the pieces is rendered as solid here - just some of them have a dense enough mesh of polygons that they look it. You'll note the lack of the tire tread pattern - that's because it was added later as a texture rather than modelled into the wheel (If you look carefully you can sort of see it where the wheel overlaps something behind it). This was a good way to save time on something that is basically flat against the curve of the tire. I quite like this image as it has a real X-Ray look to it.

The last image is of a version that wasn't used in the game - this is the high-poly version as no low-poly was built. This one has a shorter engine block and is short a set of wheels at the back. I preferred this one, but it was felt that the six wheel version better reflected the Marauder design sensibilities.

Marauder "Inferno GX" Gunship
Art Directed by Chad Greene & Susan Cenci. Concept by Todd Marshall.

The Gunship had an interesting development path as it's concept was very different right up until it was time to actually make it. The initial concept was less compact and maneuverable looking. When the time was approaching to build the ship Michael Clark was constructing the smaller of the two Marauder walkers for the game, and I looked over at a point when it lacked legs. "Y'know," I said "That actually looks like it would make a badass gunship."

We mentioned this to Chad (the art director) and he agreed, so the whole thing went back to Todd to make the same basic form into something that could fly. The result is what's shown here. It also gave me a starting point, since the concept was based on the walker I could re-use some of what Michael had constructed for it. I modified it a fair bit, but it was still nice to have a base to work from.

The first two images shown above are of the high-poly model. I tried something different here, where I textured the high-poly version and then "baked" that texture information down to the low-poly (in the same way that I usually bake down the detail into a normal-map texture). This worked out quite well for the most part, although there was still a reasonable amount of work required on the low poly version too, but again I had a nice base to work from.

The second two images are of the final game ready model. Unfortunately due to some changes in the game design from the vehicles initial inception you barely get to see the exterior in the game. You do see quite a bit of the interior, which I also built, but I don't have any images of that handy. Aspects of the colouration were once again changed after I had left the project - most notably the yellow balls changing to purple. Could have been worse, could have changed to blue - who wants their gunship to have blue balls?

One thing to note, about both the interior and the exterior, is that it hearkens back to the Pyro GX from Descent, which was the first game Volition did back when it was still a part of Parallax Software.

Marauder Heavy Walker Cinematic Interior
Art Directed by Jasen Whiteside, Chad Greene & Susan Cenci.
Initial concept by Steve Holt.

The exterior of the Marauder Heavy Walker was the work of Michael Clark and Todd Marshall, but when it became clear that an interior was going to be needed for cinematic cutscenes it fell to me and Steve Holt to create it.

Steve did an initial concept, but I had to make a number of changes in order to fit it into the interior space, which was more ramped than we had initially realized. Other than that there's not really much to say that the images don't make clear, except that as with the LAV interior it needed to appear to be of a resolution the game engine could handle, even though the cutscenes were to be pre-rendered.

That's quite enough for today. Only one post left regarding Armageddon I think, and then it'll be on to other (older) games. I shall try and get back into the groove on the sketching and such, otherwise I'll be running out of things to post about awfully quickly.

All Work and No Play... (RFA Part1)

So as some of you may have ascertained by now I work in the games industry for a company called Volition. It's a fairly well known company, predominantly for the Saints Row games these days, but also for the Red Faction games and some other stuff you may or may not have heard of. I've worked on a few titles there at this point, predominantly as a vehicle artist. I've asked if it's OK to show some of my work from shipped titles (shipped means "finished" basically), and this is apparently fine as long as I don't slip you any source art (the actual files that end up in the game). I'll be starting with some of my work from Red Faction: Armageddon.

A slightly different format to the usual for this series. Almost every image will be 'click to expand'-able - sometimes by a lot. There will be a Big Image Dump with small descriptions followed by some commentary and then onto the next thing.  The number of pieces per post will vary. Here we go then:

Red Faction "Razorback" Light Armored Vehicle
Art Directed by Chad Greene & Susan Cenci. Concept by Steve Holt

Game Engine Renders of unused clean version. Also the only look at the underside.

 

 

 

Beauty renders of the two used versions: Surface and Ice.  Also two looks at the rear door opening on the interior - more on the interior in a minute, but it isn't actually inside the vehicle in the game.  The final shot shows the ramp that was a last minute addition for a cinematic sequence.

Orthographic Views of a moderately dirty version to better show the dimensions and form.

This vehicle went through a number of changes in it's function throughout development, but once this concept was settled on it changed very little overall, but had lots of small changes for various reasons.

The "tower" to the front right of the vehicle is a turret emplacement - at one point it was automated, and then it was to be manned. Eventually it needed to be automated again, requiring it to be sealed up - but the manned version can still be seen briefly in one of the cutscene cinematics.

Two versions were required - one for above ground covered in dust, and one below ground covered in ice and frost. This was done by creating one base version (The clean one seen above) and then texturing ice and dust on top of it. The dusty one was originally quite a bit dirtier, but it didn't read very well in the environment so the amount was reduced.

The main difference between the final design and the initial concept (other than the interior) was that the original concept had an enclosed area over the front wheels rather than the separate fenders. These had to be broken off to facilitate the front wheels turning. There was a version with no fenders at one point, but I can't find a render of it - maybe I'll do one for the next All Work post. Whether I do or not it wasn't used in the final game. The concept also didn't cover the materials the vehicle was made of - carbon fiber and ceramic plate; Not the most standard of military finishes. Makes it look like it wouldn't look out of place in the Batcave, but it works in context. There were some destroyed versions of the vehicle made by Angela Lee derived from the intact original too.

It's nickname is the Razorback because it looks a bit like a warthog - but that name was already taken. 'Razorback' sounds cooler anyway...

Red Faction LAV Cinematic Interior.
Art Directed by Jasen Whiteside, Chad Greene, Susan Cenci.
Initial Concept by Steve Holt

The interior of the Light Armored Vehicle landed in my lap fairly late in the game. It was known that a detailed interior would be needed for cinematic cutscenes, but somehow it had slipped through the net and not been assigned to an artist. A low detail version had already been created, but for the cutscenes a much higher detail version was needed.

In an interesting twist the interior would need to appear as a level of detail render-able by the game engine, even though the cinematic would be pre-rendered (not dealt with in real time). This meant that while the interior had a great deal of detail, it's actual polycount would be fairly low, and the procedure for building it was very similar to any other game asset, and a lot of the detail is actually done using Normal Maps (texture maps that simulate depth) baked from a high polygon original. It would also need to match up to the exterior model that was already built.

I'm quite pleased with the interior - it looks lived in and knocked about without appearing to be overly grubby. It's detailed enough that there's always something interesting in the frame, but not so detailed that the eye is drawn to it over the important character work in the scenes.

The only other thing of note really is that the Hammer on the wall is the iconic hammer from Red Faction: Guerrilla (the previous game in the series), originally designed by Glenn Israel, modeled by Josh Powers and then reworked by Michael Clark. I reworked it again for this interior of course.

I think that's enough for today. I'm away for three weeks starting on Tuesday. If I can I'll get another post in before I leave (more game asset stuff), but if not it'll keep until I get back - I've lots more where this came from.