A bit of hard surface practice plus a chance to use Zbrush for something not bumpy and lumpy. This character is a high ranking official of some sort, out in the bad areas in a suit fit for hot, cold, bad air, and whatever else may show up.
The first one is for a would-be game of mine called Starfunk. It’s a space opera with a strong infusion of modern music and a visual style of psychedelic color mixed with retro sci-fi illustration. I hope to do some concept work for this universe someday. (click the logo to enlarge)
Just a sci-fi piece for fun.
It’s something of a city made of tower-of-babel style mounds of architecture, strung together with massive bridges, themselves also civilized.
I wrapped this baby up with 2 days left on my 30 day Zbrush free trial. Polypainted and rendered in Zbrush. I’m not decided yet on whether or not to get a 3D print of it.
Watch the trailer first to understand what this is:
Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.
Then watch the original of the clip I remade:
http://www.starwarsuncut.com/#/scene/428
And here is my version:
Star Wars Uncut – Scene 428 from Lucas Hardi on Vimeo.
This was so much fun to make. I did it in a few lunch hours, I didn’t stop to change something if it was crappy looking, and I worked as furiously fast as I could. Nick LaMartina here at Mythic did the audio, which I think makes the whole thing work.
UPDATE:
A second clip. This one was not as much fun as the first to make (and not as successful), but still good practice for embracing the spirit of prototypes. I’m hoping this “quick and dirty” spirit will spill over into my game dev. Once again, Nick went above and beyond with the audio.
Star Wars Uncut – Scene 206 from Lucas Hardi on Vimeo.
My first sculpt in about 3 years, the same subject as my last sculpt, but this time Paul Bonner style (still WIP):
And an update:
After spending two years as the Lead Concept Artist on Warhammer Online, I was asked to take over the UI design. It was about 6 months before we planned to release the game, we had completed the bulk of the concept art for the game, and Michael Phillippi was ready to step up as the new Lead Concept Artist.
We needed to do a ground up redesign of the UI in 6 months (it turned out to be more than 8). The UI for an MMO like WAR is a huge piece of the game, almost like an OS for the game. Beyond the HUD (which is very complex in itself) it has maps, chat, mail, a social network, maybe 50 windows total. . . basically everything you would find on Xbox Live and more.
The reason I enjoyed this gig was because I had the opportunity to come up with original features. One that made it into the game was the Open Party system. Players in WAR can see a list of groups sorted by distance, and just join up with them in one click. This makes playing WAR’s open RvR gameplay much simpler because you can find people nearby who are playing the way you want to play, be it fighting other players or fighting monsters.
I think there is a lot more we could have done with this system, and there are arguments to be made that it actually reduces community stickyness in the long term, but I think it’s a huge improvement over the old LFG standard, and a step in the right direction. This kind of functionality is a big interest of mine going forward – how do we take players playing cooperatively and help them form longer-term connections? Are open guilds the next logical step?
I found some more pieces that I thought would go well on the site here. These were done between 2005 and 2007.
I’m not a fan of the new look that was recently revealed. Without going back and looking at any of the old games, I did this sketch.
(less than an hour)
This was a painting for Dominance War 4, an art competition for game artists. I’ve been so busy with UI, that this is the first painting I’ve done in a few months.
I posted these on a forum recently. I can’t claim them as original thought, but I have found them to be my most useful heuristics in filtering game design ideas:
Everything Rests on the Core Loop
Sometimes called the “game mechanic” or the “30 seconds of fun,” the core loop is the series of actions the player will perform over and over again in the heart of gameplay. The core loop of Gears of War might be: 1) Encounter bad guys and take cover 2) Move to a good attack position 3) Kill the bad guys using a selection of your weapons 4) Re-arm and move on.
I found this sketch on my hard drive. It’s about a year old, but I still believe we will see a lot of the ideas come to fruition in the *next* generation of game consoles.
The basic idea is that the momentum from successes like the Wii and the social games market will focus the device down to a casual, cheap box. It will be like a Wii that runs Xbox Live and has all the great content available on the web (like what XBL has done with netflix). Then, the hardcore crowd can go and buy a plug-in bit that will kick it up a notch and let it run Gears of War 5 in 1080p. The hardcore market has proven in this generation that they don’t mind a fragmented, multiple SKU console with the 360 and PS3.
Pressure from quasi-open devices like the iPhone, open platforms like Facebook, and digital distribution of games in places like Steam will push things in this direction. Somebody is going to realize that if they open up their console and go against the traditional Nintendo model (tight grip on the content, complex certification), they can win. The manufacturer of this box should profit from hardware sales, but also from owning the marketplace. They can take it away from Wal Mart and Gamestop, and I believe they will try.
I always enjoy a chance to look over a list of recommended books and add a few to my amazon wishlist. So, I thought it would be a good idea to look over at my favorites on the bookshelf and write a list for the site here.
These are the top three (or 6, depending on how you look at it) books that I’ve returned to after I’ve finished them, and the books with the most to offer to a game artist:
This is my entry to Conceptart.org’s “Last Man Standing 3″ competition, round one. The topic is “Underneath it all.”
Just some sketches :)
I recently gave a short talk on Photoshop Custom Brushes here at EA Mythic (I might post about that another time). I started off talking about stylization and ended up rambling for quite a while. I think the subject is big enough to deserve a post.
What I’m going to say here has been said before by many others and probably said much better. But, this version is focused squarely on how stylization relates to games. What I’m interested in is how to make a game more attractive and make it cheaper to produce with a single style.
I’m thinking about trying to get a 3D printout of this guy after he’s done. I’m just starting on the armor.
Another Warhammer Online character – a Rat Ogre.
It’s the most common division of labor amongst game artists today. In my experience, there is a distinct skill imbalance in favor of character artists. They’re what students and hobbyists almost always are, and so the best artists get to choose to keep working on characters. The best of the rest get to do something else, most often environment art.
Environment work is more typically done with proprietary systems and tools for a given game. For example, Unreal’s use of terrain, structures and static meshes is probably very different from the Battlefield engine’s use of similar tech. Lighting systems can get very complex. It’s hard to just create an environment for a game without groking a specific game’s tools and tech (which tend to be harder to use and understand than something like Max). It’s easier to experiment with character work for fun and really get a sense for how it would look in a game.
You could always make an entire game level, but that’s a huge undertaking and requires level design skills in addition to art skills. So, when you’re interested in creating some game art but not getting into all the technical drudgery found in game dev, it’s much easier to make characters.
If you have hobbyists or modders, everybody is going to want to make the characters because there is less game-specific drudgery to learn. If there’s a conflict over who gets to do the characters and who is forced to do the environments, the better artists are going to get their way and do the characters.
None of this means that characters are more important than environments in games. Characters and environments are at least equally important in most games. But, I think this appeal is responsible for why environment work often gets neglected and why good environment artists are harder to find.
With newer tech like Unreal Engine 3, we’re finally able to do environments justice and create really engaging and detailed architecture, complex lighting and color balancing. I think environments are going to start getting a lot more attention than characters in the new generation of games.
This is an imbalance that we need to fix. For our games to get better, we need our best artists working on environments.
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