Friday, August 12, 2005
An amateur artist is me
I made it a goal a couple of weeks ago to put in 20+ minutes per day of art training / practice. This includes pencil sketching, learning Blender, and QuArk. Part of my inspiration came from working on Hackenslash. Now, the artwork in Hackenslash is hardly anything I'd brag about. I was largely mucking about with photographs or procedural textures. But I did notice my speed and quality improving in a slow-evolution fashion as I learned new tricks and became familiar with the tool - and learned by trial and error what worked and what didn't.
Granted, I'm still in the sub-cro-magnon cave painting stage, but even knowing how far I've got to go before I can draw anything resembling acceptable in a commercial environment, seeing rapid progress in the early stages of the learning curve was heartening.
Over the last few months I've given advice to new indie game developers (which is weird, because I'm still kind of a "new indie" myself - just one who has some industry experienced and a finished indie game). I often hear artists lament for the lack of programmers, and I respond, "Look, you can use these tools here to get something up-and-running with a minimum amount of programming or scripting. You don't need to be a genius coder, just learn to do enough to inspire programmers to join you." So I'm trying to see if the inverse is true.
Lacking anything resembling a real budget, I don't have artists at my beck and call to whip out concept art or touch up textures. I've been extremely jealous of the talent and skill of the artists and modelers I see out there who can contribute so much to a game when it feels like I code for WEEKS to create something that can't even be shown in a screenshot. So I'm hoping that with enough practice I can at least do well enough to communicate with the pros, create a thumbnail and say, "Hey, I need something like THIS."
Or maybe I could modify the texture of a character model without them getting spooky-weird bug-eyes and Cthulhu lips.
And I have to admit - learning to create visual assets for a game (like my still-not-quite-finished barn) has been a lot of fun. DANGEROUS, because I'm actually working on two projects right now, and it could get really easy to get sucked into playing with Blender for hours and hours.
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:36 AM (Permalink)
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What are your thoughts on going hyper-unrealistic as a response to the increasing demands for, well, hyper-realistic visuals? As the bigger studios are pushing the forefront of the latter, it seems to me that we can take advantage of the neglected former. We'd like to try this for our next title; and developers are already dabbling with it, with Rez, Katamari, and just recently, the "Drivey" demo, which I think looks really attractive.
Depends on the game. If the art style doesn't inhibit the player from enjoying the game, identifying with the characters, etc. - then I say go for it.
Outpost Kaloki takes a very stylized approach. The graphics are NOT pushing the polygon limits of any modern machine by any stretch, but it is still a very attractive (not to mention PLAYABLE) game. Some of my favorite games took kind of a stylized approach to graphics - like Grim Fandango, and EverQuest (though I didn't really like the art style in the post-Velious update of EQ). World of Warcraft is also going this route.
I think it's the way things are going to have to go. Photorealism is great for generating "ooohs" and "aaaahs," but I think it's not practical for game development. I don't think the market can support this obsessive focus on making games resemble movies.
I'm currently working with a couple of artists right now for the current project to try and nail down a STYLE. Photorealism ain't it! But we have to make sure that the style matches the game. I would like to go for a more cartoony look that resembles, say, a graphic novel. I'm playing with light and shadow a LOT with this one, so the ultra-cartoony cell-shading stuff won't work. We need something somewhere in-between: I just lack the knowledge and skill in the field to easily identify or even recognize what it is I'm looking for.
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Outpost Kaloki takes a very stylized approach. The graphics are NOT pushing the polygon limits of any modern machine by any stretch, but it is still a very attractive (not to mention PLAYABLE) game. Some of my favorite games took kind of a stylized approach to graphics - like Grim Fandango, and EverQuest (though I didn't really like the art style in the post-Velious update of EQ). World of Warcraft is also going this route.
I think it's the way things are going to have to go. Photorealism is great for generating "ooohs" and "aaaahs," but I think it's not practical for game development. I don't think the market can support this obsessive focus on making games resemble movies.
I'm currently working with a couple of artists right now for the current project to try and nail down a STYLE. Photorealism ain't it! But we have to make sure that the style matches the game. I would like to go for a more cartoony look that resembles, say, a graphic novel. I'm playing with light and shadow a LOT with this one, so the ultra-cartoony cell-shading stuff won't work. We need something somewhere in-between: I just lack the knowledge and skill in the field to easily identify or even recognize what it is I'm looking for.
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