Rapid prototyping

I am really bad at updating I have realized. I do loads of stuff, but never get around to show anything. I really have to get better at this :)

So here is something I can actually show you. I haven't got around to do anymore 3D I can show you unfortunately. There has been a lot going on that has taken up time (Zelda). Instead of any 3D I will instead show you the things I have done for our game design course where we have been doing rapid prototyping.

Me and my BFF Stina made a sandbox storytelling game, and I would like to show you what I contributed with. The task was to make a sandbox game made out of 49 squares (7x7). On each square an event should take place, and the result of the game round should be as a readable story. We decided to set it in a fantasy world with a murder story. You wake up beside your husband who has been brutally murdered. The soldiers of the county are chasing you, but you still want to cleanse your name of any disbelief.


I drew the map with the 49 squares and various game features we had added. I also made the items. Stina had already drawn some of them in the event cards (one for each square), I had to come up with the ones she hadn't drawn, and colour the ones she had. It took quite a while to finish, but was very fun.


I hope I can upload the entire game so you may download it and play it at home :)

I will try to write something as soon as possible and not forget this time :)
Have a happy holliday :)

Workin'

Hi everyone.

It was ages since I last posted anything, I know. I really have to learn to upload things more often! Anyways, I have been doing things, I haven't just slacked off and played Oblivion (or have I....). Ok, there has been a little Oblivion, but a lot of drawing and modeling as well. At the moment I am modeling a retro futuristic bus for my coming portfolio (yaaay). I have also been drawing for a storyboard for class and sculpting a bust for my zbrush course.

That is the thing I thought I should show you now. This week we have practised beauty renders and how that works. Last week we managed light rigs so, today we were supposed to make a final render as the assignment for the last week of the course.



My next picture is from a 2D course, the one in with the storyboarding. I created a concept for an alien that the protagonist hunts down. I have shown you the concept for the character before, Logan. This is her antagonist in the story. The one she is supposed to bash the head of. I would like to sculpt this in zbrush later, and maybe put it in my portfolio as well. I think that if I can model assets from the same story concept it will give my portfolio a more complete look, so that is what I am going for.


The 3D bus of course isn't part of this universe, but is another idea of mine.

More on that later fellas, gonna model some more and then have a hamburger with my friends :)
Ciao

Boarding a mood

Yo everyone!

I have made concepts of the main character before and now I wanted to continue working with the other elements of the show reel to be. So I decided to make mood boards for the elements that I will be working on in the near future, the alien and the passageway in which my character Logan will move in.



I have quite a clear idea of what I want the setting to look like. I am thinking that the setting should be kind of like the corridors of nowadays ships, but with a futuristic touch. I want it to be narrow and suffocating in the corridor, almost a bit claustrophobic.



For the alien I had more problems. It should be really gross and slimy and awful. I had insects as an inspiration as I wrote the manuscript for the show reel, but I looked more and more on deep sea creatures as I created the mood board. I want my alien to have lots of legs and tentacles as well as those really creepy huge eyes that the deep sea fishes has.

I started searching for insects but couldn't find that many interesting pictures. Therefore I googled instead "gross insects" but I had to go back, it was too much. It felt like there was something creeping over me as I looked at those horrid pictures. Yuck!

So anyways, this weekend my mother is coming to visit, so there will not be that much done.
Hope you have a great weekend :)

Conceptalicious!

Yo everyone!!

I have been concepting the character of a very short animatic type of film that I am working with in school. The assignment is to create a manuscript, break it down, make concepts and create a storyboard that you are supposed to animate in After Effects.

I have written a short manuscript where the female engineer Logan sneaks around on a space ship and kills aliens. She works on the ship and it has been attacked by insect-like aliens.
So, I have been drawing on the concept of the main character Logan (I know it is a man's name, but I liked the idea of it as a name on a woman :)). Last week I made some silhouettes and now I have been cleaning and put some colour on the concept. The colour really isn't necessary for the assignment, but I thought that it would be fun.

I know that the concept is very sketchy, but I really wanted to post this, so I did it anyway. Well now you can see how I work :)

So any ways, it is Saturday, and time for some cosiness :D

CIAO

Summer is over

Hi again.

Omg, my last post was right after GGC and I haven't as much as look at my blog since then. It is really time to make an update!
This summer I have been studying life drawing with Pernilla Person as our awesome teacher. I have learnt so much and I am so grateful that I have had the opportunity to take this course.

I thought I should post some of the work I did :)

During the course we worked from using simple lines to get the feeling of the pose right, not concerning ourselves with proportions and details.

The next week we added volumes! It was important to get everything at the right place this early in the drawing process, that's why using simple volumes such as boxes and cylinders are so important. That way you can easily change what you have done if you recognize that some thing doesn't fit.


Later in the course we focused more and more on details. Learning about the anatomy and putting the muscles where they were supposed to be. Now there is actually a person instead of simple volumes :)


Also we had the amazing opportunity to draw a female model in a wonderful medieval dress! It was awesome :)



In our last week our job was to build a sculpture with clay, using all that we learned during the course. It is hard to show you in a few pictures of the enormous development in my drawing techniques, but when I look back at the first pieces I made for this course I am very glad of all the things I have learnt. If you have the chance to take this course, DO IT!

Now I'm gonna watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid!
Ta ta

At long last

Hi everyone.

It has been a long time since I last wrote in this blog, and that has been because of the huge amount of work that we did right before GGC, but also because after the conference I needed some chill time.

Summer has arrived for real in Sweden and this is a great opportunity to relax a bit and reminisce about the project I have been a part of.

As I have told you before I have been working with the project Bane for the last ten weeks. It is a teambesed multiplayer game for the PC in an fantasy enviroment where the players main goal is to capture nodes to gather the Abzolium resourse to win the match. The students in the group wanted to create a great artefacts for ones portfolios, get experience and we also wanted to continue working with the game to get a future game release.

When I joined this group I decided that I wanted to work mainly with art. Last year, on the project SAGE, I did not get very much art done. I was producing the group and made almost all of the animations, but no art of my own, concept art, textures or models. Therefore I wanted to try and figure out this year what I want to work with in the future. If I want to create 2D art, 3D art, animations or if I want to design or produce.

During this project I have learnt soooo much. Prior to working on Bane I have made nearly no textures or 3D models for a real game project, and now when it is all over I realise how much i have developed, and that I am actually pretty proud of the art that I have produced for the game.

Also, GGC went very well. We got very good feed back that we can use in further development. A lot of people thought it looked great, and hey, then I have done my part right!

So, one week after the conference I feel happy and optimistic towards the future. I have learnt a lot, things I can surely use in the future. One thing I haven't learnt though is what I want to do in the future. As I have told you guys earlier I loved our way of working where I had a varied tasks. I made concepts, models, textures and even collaborated when creating the level. This is great for me, I realized that I even enjoyed working with creating UV-maps for a change when I had been texturing for quite some time. I hope that there will be some diversity in work later on in my career as well.

As I said earlier, I haven't figured out what will become of me further on in my career. I do like diversity in my job, yet I sill know that you have to be especially great at something, and what that is, I haven't realized yet. But, I don't feel any stress about this. I have my whole life to learn what I want to do!

As, I have said I have learnt alot, and nearly everything has been from making misstakes. Small, but important things that you need to remember every time you are making artifacts for your game. I have written about this earlier (That really long and exhausting blog post, remember?), all theese small things make up a whole that creates a better workflow. I do believe that it is a great start for everyone on the team working in the same area to write down guidelines for how artifacts are about to be produced. Then everyone can produce things more efficently, not everyone has to be there at all times to give instructions or help on things that are made.

Furthermore, which I have also discussed in earlier blogposts, the key thing to remembver is to have great communication. I think we had quite good communication in general between, at least the artists in the group, but I am sure that many things could have been better, and that if we had made this project once again, we would have done things alot different.

So this summer I have decided to focus on life drawing, in which I will take a course, and I will also try to do some modeling and animation. I made 2D animations for 3 years but haven't tried 3D animations at all, so I am really pepped to see how it works and learn a lot.

So, to everyone that have followed this blog, thank you, and do keep reading. I will try to continue my updates during the summer, posting art that I am creating.

What happens next year, I will try to figure out during the summer. Hope you get a great summer!

CIAO!

Crunch time!

Hi everyone, it has been another exciting week since I last wrote anything, the reason: the epic crunch has started! For the past week we have been working 12 hours a day, seven days a week! GGC is in less than two weeks and we still have a lot to do. It is tiring but very enjoyable to work like this, we get a lot done in a day and can see our progress! We try to make our crunch as enjoyable as possible, for example, this Saturday we worked, ate pie and watched the Eurovision song contest together :)

For this post I want to update you with some things I have created for the first week of the crunch, as well as show you a texture I made for our character B-Bob quite a while ago.

METAL
I am going to begin with sharing some of the textures I have made for some of the mechanical artefacts found in the game.

First out is one of the turrets the players can buy and use as extra defence while playing. This is the Frost turret!



Here is the re spawn machine, if you die while playing the game, here is where you will be resurrected, so you can continue playing! Imagine this with super awesome particle effects of lightning!



Last but not least, here is an example of the mechanical stairs that the teams has placed out in the near vicinity of their home bases to get from low to high ground and vice versa!


Wheelbarrows

So, as I said before I would give you some thoughts on the texture for our second character B-Bob. When creating the texture, I started by making the wheelbarrow in a tree material, as this was what Stina who made the character concept had decided on. When starting out finding a base colour to work from, I could not find anything I liked. After a while I tried a different approach, I decided to make the wheel barrow in a metal material instead. This made more sense to me because B-Bob uses his wheel barrow as his weapon and smashes things with it. If it would have been made of tree it might have been destroyed much earlier. I showed my results to Stina and Elias and they liked it. It was also better because this B-Bob got more contrasts in colour.

Here is a picture of the finished texture of B-Bob including his awesome wheelbarrow :)



So, with that, it is back to work, see ya!

My work!

Hi everyone!

As I have told you, I am working as an artist for our team, creating both 2D and 3D art. When entering this project I wanted to develop as an artist. Last year I was with the group creating a game called SAGE for GGA. At that time, my role was that of a producer and there for I did not have as much time as I would have liked to draw and develop artistically. Since I have not decided in which field I would like to work with in the future I wanted to try out to work as an art "grunt".

As I am most focused on 2D art at the moment, all though I have created quite a few 3D models for the project, I will try to form a list of what skills are useful when one should work as a 2D artist for a game company. This will hopefully give a clearer view to me as an artist what I need to focus and practice on to become a great 2D artist. I will focus mainly on concepts and textures as this is what I have been working with.

To be a great 2D artist especially when you are making concepts, I do believe one of the most important skills you can have is creativity and imagination. You can have awesome drawing skills and make the most beautiful images, but it does not matter that much if you don't have any imagination. If you can't create something of your own or use your imagination to create someone else's vision, I do believe you will have a hard time as an artist for a game company.

Another important skill for all members of a game designing team is to have social skills. If you have a hard time talking to your co-workers and agree on development choices, you will have a hard time creating a great game. One thing that can really mess up a project is bad team work, were not everyone are moving towards the same goal. I think you should always think of the different aspects of the game, even if you are just making concepts or textures. What makes a great game, is when everyone is working together, communicating often so that everything works together. Always think about every aspect of the prop you are creating.

Of course, one essential skill is that you can draw. Of course this require you to practise, practise and practise some more. You can never be too good at anything, and you can always learn new techniques and skills. It takes determination and passion to be a really great artist.

There are a lot of skills one need to become a great artist, and I can go on forever, but one that I think is extra important, not only for artists but for developers in general, is to be able to kill your darlings. If you can't deny them you will not develop as fast. I do believe it is good to have some skills that you always can bring with you, some things you do good and like to do, but if you want to learn new things and develop and are willing to adapt and change your style, you are more likely to get a job or be great at something else. One thing that is really boring is to see the same art and games over and over again.

PHEEEW! Now that was covered!
So to finish up, what tips and tricks do I use to learn and develop as an artist?
I want to start by saying that I have learnt a lot during this project, and I can easily say that nearly all of them has been done while making mistakes.

It takes a lot of time and the text will be quite extensive if I should describe all the best practices one may use when creating art for a game, but I think I can squeeze in a few.

As a rule of thumb, I think it is, as I mentioned earlier, very important to think of the other team mates when creating your art, weather it be 2D or 3D. For example: always scribble down the measurements of the things you are making concepts of, so that the person making the 3D art does not end up with a house smaller than a bush for example.

When you are creating 3D art, always remember to erase all irrelevant polygons without destroying the models silhouette, always create an as understandable UV-map as possible making it easier for the one making the textures and make sure that your model does not have any n-gons (polygons with more than 4 faces).

A good thing is to write down lists of standard actions you should do before sending your work forward to the next worker in line. If something is wrong and that is discovered much later in the project, it will be very costly, both in time and resources.

PHEEEW once again! That was a long post, I hope both you and I have learnt something, and before I go, I just want to say that if I come up with any more great practices whilst working, I will try to update it to you!

Thank you for reading :)

Characters!!!!

Yo, everyone!

What up? This week has been filled with mishaps and computer crashes. This Monday my computer decided to die and for about two days I could not work at all. I had to make back up files for everything in safe mode on my computer and then turn it in to the technical support at school. The next day when it was returned to me it was installed with old versions of the programs I used and Windows XP. So, therefore I had to spend the entire Tuesday with attaining the correct versions of the programs I needed, install these and get the computer ready for action. One our before going home I could finally start working.

But everything is fixed now and the computer is running smoothly! :D

So instead of telling you of all these boring issues I am going to show you the texture of our first character the Starving Barbarian that I have been working with in two iterations.

I created the first texture some weeks ago, but we decided that the model we used then had too few details. Therefore we added more polygons to the model, making it more interesting. For this texture I just had to move around the diffuse I had created for the model with too few polysgons.

I think it turned out good! The changes to the model really created a more interesting character that is interesting to look at, and has his own character. I especially like the expressionless, yet angry face with the huge bags under his eyes!



Before I go I also want to show you a fun glimps at our next awesome character, at the moment called B-Bob! When I was drawing his face on the diffuse Elias said that he did not have enough lips, and after that it got out of hand! I actually hope that we could use create some nutty textures for our characters just for the fun of it!



Any ways, have a nice evening!

Ciao :)

First Post!

Hi everybody!
This is my first post for this blog! As you can see in my presentation I am a student at the University of Gotland studying to become a great Game Developer. Currently I am creating 2D art for the team Square Eyed Vision! I am making concepts and creating textures for our 3D models! I am working on this project to develop my artistic skills and become a better artist. I hope that with this project i will learn a lot that I can use for further studies and later while working! Also i user you to read my co-workers blogs as they will be just as interesting.

well then, have a good night!

Live long and prosper :D