3.02.2013

HOWDY!

How's everyone doing, since nothing has been posted in a while I figured I'll put some stuff up.






Some are still works in progress....but stuff I've been doing.

-D

5 comments:

  1. It's nice to see you posting up some new work! I like some of the shapes you're using in the silhouettes of the spacecraft, there's something charming about the more organic ones, even if they are more simplistic.
    My main crit is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of solidity behind these vehicles, it seems like you're drawing them in these orthographic views but you don't have a clear idea of what shape and space they actually occupy. While hard surface stuff may or may not be what you like doing best or want to emphasize, it's important for a designer to be able to know how these things are put together, otherwise they're mostly just vague thoughts.

    To that point and to avoid sounding overly harsh, I've run into this problem myself professionally recently. When I get to do concept art work that is handed off to a 3D artist to build (when I'm not building it myself) I've sometimes not made completely sure that it actually physically works, like painting the inside of a spaceship compartment that's interesting but is actually too big for the exterior of the ship, or is packed in so tightly that the fuselage of the ship itself would be as thin as drywall rather than having room for armor, water and oxygen lines, other componentry, etc.
    When this happens I've wasted my own time (cuz I have to draw it again) and I've wasted the 3D artist's time because I've given them something that they have to re-design just to be able to build it (essentially doing my job again) or they have to try, realize it's impossible and give it back, which isn't very efficient.

    So, please learn from my experience, use your brain hard core when you're designing this stuff ( I usually find I have to do a lot of dissection of reference images and turn off my music or podcasts so I can hear my thoughts). Understand these things so well as you're designing them so that you can cram that information into the silhouettes so that they suggest a lot of 3D information, and then go and draw that information in 3D.
    Work on making each step of your process such that it overlaps and helps the next step of your process if at all possible!

    Thanks for sharing your work! Hope school is treating you well!

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  2. yes I started running into that problem, research research research!

    I went over the vehicles with my teacher the other day and the only one he could really get behind was the desert dune buggy sketch at the top. Right now I'm working on sketching a solid vehicle and making it look right for a 3D artist, something I've never done before.

    Enjoying it more when I research the topic and just draw. Its funny that you mention pulling our the earbuds because I've been doing that lately, not sure why but music is annoying while drawing now. :D Annnnnyway how's work going for you? Any new work updates?

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  3. I'm glad you're still able to take constructive criticism! If you keep sharing your work I'll keep trying to give you crits that will best help prepare you for the industry based on my own experience.
    Keep in mind I'm coming from a particular point of view though, I'm working at an independent studio and don't really have the luxury of only being able to work on concept art exclusively.
    I just started on a new project in January and this is how things developed:

    About 1-2 weeks of cranking out purely fun, random ideas before we settled on one thing and pushed through on specific concept design stuff for it. Toward the end I was working on environment things so this meant painting specific examples of color and lighting in different parts of the level, examples of geological formations and foliage and stuff, etc.
    Then since the level designers had already begun to block out the level with big rough polygons we jumped into building assets for it, so I spent 2-3 weeks or so in 3D.
    During this time sometimes random things would come up where we would come up with a new gameplay concept which would require a new element in the level, or we would need to conceptualize how something in game would look, like UI or HUD stuff so I'd jump back to 2D to concept something for that.

    I have a feeling that's how things will continue to progress. We're currently pushing toward our first big deadline and so after this we'll be starting working on a new environment and start that process over again. It definitely helps to be doing 3D and 2D stuff though, it makes you respect more what the 3D artists have to do, and I've found that I really enjoy doing 3D work, it's just frustrating because I'm slow at it. :)

    I'll share some new work later, I don't have a lot that I can show presently, because I'm on my laptop and don't have access to the files on my desktop.

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  4. awesome, thanks for sharing. I've been meaning to dive back into 3D to put it into some concepts. But I'm sure I will once I start making assets for my game this semester. What has helped me recently is ditching the idea of doing artwork and instead just design and making sure the idea gets across, shameless about using photos and textures..as long as I get the idea across...realizing its a lot more liberating and fun.

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  5. Yo!,
    I know im late chiming in, but I thought I should try and reinforce what Eric said about not listening to music, or in my case, audio books. I've just gotten into the habit of not listening to anything after about 2 years straight of audio books while working. It makes the time fly by, which is why i stated listening to them in the first place, but after all that time I found my work was really stagnating and now that Im off, Its really driving home what its like to actually FOCUS on something, not just zone out and render.

    Also, I'm loving the spaceship silhuettes, those are tight, and are great initial studies to get the overall shape right before being bogged down with to much technical detail. Sometimes that can lead to interesting design decisions, kind of a "Function follows form"

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