Kingdom Death Architect

Another Mini for Kingdom Death complete!

Atelier Totori: The Adventure of Arland

Xmas is over! The new year is here, and the holiday madness is almost finished, 2012 is going to be massive!

Lots of things planned, lots of art to and projects to finish - also a big update to my folio website coming soon!

Got another couple of games finished to write about as well, firstly:

Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland ( PS3 )
























(Cover Art)

I've played Atelier Iris 1 and 2 so I went into this game knowing basically how this game should play out - and was pleasantly surprised after a few hours of play!

In a nutshell, its an awesome game, loads of replayability with different endings. It looks amazing, sounds amazing and crafting is super addictive, I just wish the game wasn't time restricted!!!

Graphics: Quite simply, it looks awesome. The 2d portraits by Mel Kishida used in conversations and story cut scenes are amazing, the characters are so clean, clear and full of expression.

The 3d character models are also flawless, high resolutions and amazing hand painted textures really make them pop. The enemies are equally as impressive, brimming with detail and expertly crafted. Its clear the character team did a really great job here.




















(Conversation between Totori and Mimi one of the characters she meets on her adventure)

I noticed the environments are slightly lower in quality than the characters - there's a lack of Ambient occlusion in some areas which really pop out from the areas that do have it and the polycounts look much lower in general.

The odd texture seam here and there doesn't do them any favors either. I wouldn't say the explorable areas are uninspiring in design, but they certainly aren't taking my breath away, it seems as though the direction for the environment team was not as strong as it was for the characters.

I thought the color palette was almost a perfect match to the 2d Illustrations that Mel Kishida did for the original characters, which is not something you see everyday!!

The combat effects are amazing, and the super moves remind me a little of the 'over the top' final fantasy summon effects.

The font is super easy to read and the ui and menus are clean, clear and well designed.

Really no BIG issues with the graphics, its all very consistent, and I'm a sucker for awesome hand painted work.

Something else worthy of note is the expert shader work on the characters, some of the best cell shaded work Ive seen so far. The hair deserves an extra special mention - the anisotropic specular is easily the best I've ever seen done in this style, really top notch stuff.

Story: Without spoiling it, the story is really quite simple, Totori wants to become an adventurer so she can be strong enough to go and find her mom who was also an adventurer but disappeared when Totori was very young.

To become an adventurer like her mom, Totori needs to get an adventurers license, and to keep the license she needs to do a certain amount of jobs for people within a given time frame.

You'll meet a whole host of characters who want to help Totori on her way, and you'll have to choose who to take with you, which in turn will craft quite a unique little story. There is so much room for replayability here its not even funny!!





















(Rorona, Totori & Sterk dialogue)

Of worthy note is the dialogue, not only is it really well written, its been expertly translated - no 'engrish' here.

Gameplay: Firstly the story is presented in 2d story cut scenes which is usually a painted background with emotive character portraits that slide in from both sides of the screen as well as voice overs to tell the story. The majority of Atelier Totori is played in full 3d and you have no control over the camera - this wasn't really a problem though, as I cant recall ever really needing to adjust it.

Loading screens separate all movement from area to area or movement from town to world map and vice versa but they are very quick and not jarring at all. IE you can run around in the main street in town, but walk up to a shop door = quick loading screen to pop you into the interior.

The main gameplay happens in 4 'areas':

An Atelier in town, where you will spend your time crafting in your cauldron, saving your game, checking reagents and taking part in many character building and story progressing conversations with various people.

A Town with people you can talk to, shop to buy things, pubs to find jobs and accept errands.

The World Map which shows you an overview of where you are able to explore and labels explorable areas.

Explorable areas where you will fight enemies and gather reagents for crafting.





















(World map - the gold rings indicate explorable areas. It costs time to move between them!)

The goal of the game is to help Totori on her way to becoming a fully fledged adventurer. This essentially means taking requests and doing jobs for people, which is usually either crafting something, hunting a specific monster, or tracking down top quality reagents.

Once you've done enough jobs, you can upgrade your license, which unlocks more areas on the world map and increases the distance you can explore, and of course unlocks more difficult enemies and so on. This goes on for many years of game time. ( Sounds like a lot of time, but trust me its not )

Crafting is really what the atelier games are all about, and you can spend eons of time doing this alone as each reagent you find comes with a set of augments that are rated from E through A and S being SUPER great. Don't like this B grade water ? Find an A grade well!!

Crafting requires a recipe, (which you can purchase in stores or obtain from npc's) and reagents, (found by foraging out in the field or through defeating enemies). You'll want to try and find the highest quality reagents to make the best quality stuff IE explosive combat items that do more damage or armor that has more defensive capability and so on. All but the most basic of Armor, Weapons and items are crafted, so to make it easier your going to have to craft!

Combat is great in the Atelier games, its always been fast and responsive, something which in many rpg's can become really tedious after 20 hours or so. I thought due to the 3d nature of this game it would have been much slower than the strictly sprite based Atelier Iris 1 and 2, but they really nailed it. I can easily stab away at issuing my commands and speed combat up by skipping epic moves and so on - super handy when I bump into some low level beasties.

Combat is not random, its initiated by running into enemies or you can try hitting them with your staff for a chance at a surprise attack.

Once initiated, you issue commands to Totori + 2 other characters of your choice and like many traditional rpg's you wont actually control the characters or move them around the battle screen.

Each supportive character has HP and MP for health and magic and an action bar that accumulates with each action they take. It can be used to assist Totori in her attacks or defend Totori from incoming attacks. If unused, the bar fills right up and once full, unlocks that particular supportive characters super move. There are epic boss fights that will test an underdeveloped party!!





















(Sterk busts out his super move 'Lichtschneiden'!!!)

Defeating enemies nets you a little cash, and some enemy specific reagents - that means farming aplenty!

The other way to accumulate reagents is to forage at foraging points inside one of the explorable areas on the world map. Foraging points are indicated with a speech bubble that pops up only if your near enough, which I thought was a nice touch. A little icon inside the speech bubble will give you some idea of how rare the ingredients area in that forage point.

Exiting the area and re-entering it will reset the enemies of any explorable area and the contents of the forage points - but that uses up more time! that means more farming!

Controlling Totori feels really good, props to the animators for getting that run speed both looking and feeling just right. The animation all round is spot on, especially on some of the massive creatures - props to the rigging / skinning guys for great work.

My biggest issue with Atelier Totori is that the whole game is time based. Combat, foraging, moving from a town to a foraging area on the world map, crafting etc etc it all takes time, thereby limiting the amount of things you can potentially do in any given amount of time.

12 months to achieve x - sounds like a lot of time but the fact is you can burn through 1 month just crafting a few things before heading out on an adventure!!! So believe me, choose wisely! Don't waste your time!

The kicker about this was that I felt that once the map really opened up and there was dozens and dozens of places for me to explore I wanted to spend more time, looting, plundering and whacking monsters. I think the designers should have opened it up to complete wandering free of time, upon completion of the game!

Audio: Quite simply, its awesome. The English voice over's are much better than I expected, and there is an all round quality to everything from combat sounds, effect sounds and music that to be brutally honest just wasn't there in the first 2 Atelier games.

Length: The game doesn't end if you die in combat, your simply resurrected and you loose some time recovering. But it does end, if you don't meet your license requirements for that time allotment. Therefor there are so many 'endings' to get based on choices you make in the time allotted. Thankfully, one play through can be done in probably 10 - 12 hours if your being thorough and taking your time. I've watched 2 play throughs of the game now and they yielded VERY drastically different 'endings'.

Overall: I like this game, it looks great, sounds great and it has oodles of replayability. Its a well crafted piece of art, and my hat goes off to the development team. If it wasn't time constrained and I was able to explore the world more, this would be a contender for my top 50 games of all time.















I also finished Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together over the Xmas break so Ill write something up about that shortly!

Happy New Year :)

Kingdom Death Eve

Okay, just a short one this time!

A face mockup of Eve for Kingdom Death.

Phantasy Star Portable for PSP and other things!

After about 2 months without our PC's we should finally be getting them back in a couple of days! Wohoo!! Cant wait to get back into creating art!!

Quite a few things to catch up with once we get them back.

1) Cleanup my Female Face tutorial.
2) Prototype some male and female faces & then bodies for a top secret project!!
3) Finish off my Fran Bust.
4) Finish off my Civil War Vampire Chick.

I also decided to start writing a few things down about the games I finish from a developers point of view, I'm not sure if that will really be interesting for anyone but hey.

I recently finished off Phantasy Star Portable and it wasn't as bad as what I thought:

I'm a huge fan of the original series Phantasy star I, II, and III, I actually owe Phantasy Star for being probably one of the first rpg's I ever played, so I do have a soft spot for the series and its mythology.

In a sentence: The game started off like absolute crack, but then tapered off and dragged on a bit towards the end.

A bit of a longer description:

The intro cut scene is pretty cool, I thought the production value looked pretty damned good, much better than what I thought it was going to be!

Character creation was much much more in depth that I was expecting from a psp game, you can pick your race and gender from a handful of races - and get right into customising all kinds of things even the size and shape of your body, making fat and unheroic looking 'heroes' is definitely possible, which was kind of refreshing to be honest. You could also customise your face quite a lot and color pretty much everything, finally choosing some clothes before jumping into the game.

Your eased into pretty much how the entire game will play, within about the first 30 minutes, story is delivered via 3d rendered portraits and speech bubbles, with probably 90% or more of these done in voice which isn't too bad of a quality. Navigating around the world and to your missions and from planet to planet is as simple as choosing a destination from a menu and your there. Talking to npc's is a simple as hovering your cursor over the npc symbol and up pop the portraits ( some of these are awesome others are just okay ) and some speech bubbles with various responses.

It soon becomes clear that the game takes place in 2 distinct areas. The safe haven of your base town, and the mission dungeons. In the towns you can visit stores, talk to people etc though none of this is 3d, its all flat rendered image based, with glowing icons to click on, or menus to navigate from place to place.

Navigating to your mission place is where you finally get to see your character, this is where the bulk of your gameplay will take place. Its fully 3d, and you basically move around through set levels clearing them of monsters, finding key cards to get through locked doors in order to move deeper through the levels and usually end up with a boss fight of some sort before moving completing the missions and advancing the story.

You will encounter Story NPC's who will give you their 'partner cards' which can be used to call upon them to join your party before you head off on your story or free missions which is wear you can grind for better weapons, or level up your characters. You can have a maximum of 3 other characters who are AI controlled in your party aside from yourself. Of worthy note here is that when I filled up my party, and had 5 or 6 enemies on screen my framerate would often fall to 3 - 4 fps and be almost unplayable, so i generally played with 3. The AI used to control the other players in your team is generally okay but often i would go through a level without realising id left one of my players behind who got stuck behind some wall etc. I also thought that the designated healers healing was mediocre at best, often busting out the healing when there was absolutely no need for it, and not spamming it when the whole team was bleeding out.

The story was pretty simple to be honest, I wont spoil it too much but if your looking for some deep twisted plot you wont find it here - though there is definitely some mystery built up in the final cut scene of the game. As mentioned above most of the story is delivered via portraits and speech bubbles but there are a couple of ingame rendered machinima style cutscenes that take place through the game's story missions.

Combat and collecting / powering up weapons and armor is really where the addictive crack is. I think they really could expand on this, but not by adding more items, but by streamlining what is there already, as its a little overwhelming - particularly in all the stats and the naming.

You have a combat quick switch of 6 or 7 slots that you can fill up with different combinations of left and right hand weapons, of which there are single and double handed variants. For example you could be fighting with 2 1 handed swords and switch out to a 2 handed axe, or dash away and pull out a sniper rifle and inflict massive damage from a distance very quickly.

There are swords, daggers, axes, guns, bows, polearms and the token crazy things like super cannons, giant hammers that all feel quite different to use in combat. There is also little helper bots which can be setup to spam either offensive and defensive magic or both.

Actual input for combat is fairly simple, its essentially a button mash for a 3 - 4 hit combo with one very simple method overlayed on top that will make each hit in your combos do MUCH more damage.

While you can just mash x for a standard combo, if you want to inflict more damage, each weapon has a different 'timing' and it will take some playing around to get that timing right but when you do, a flash effect will appear before every swing and you'll do much more damage. essentially making for quicker kills. There is also special techniques for each weapon which you can equip and unleash when ever you want in your combo, these techniques also level up and get more powerful the more you use them, another addictive little element.

The actual controls for camera placement could be much better, its annoying to keep the camera at an angle that works well for combat, and you notice it especially when flying bosses are whizzing about overhead.

Enemy AI is fairly easy, with some brutal opponents showing up much later on. Most of the cannon fodder makes for grindy missions just to fight some of the bosses which are generally much cooler to fight. Giant Dragons, Demons and other beasts make for some brutal boss encounters, especially for the unprepared - if you've come to the fight with only swords and the creature has a tough hide, you've easily made the encounter last 5 - 10 times longer so its best to set yourself up with a library of weapons and different attack styles at your disposal.

The final boss fight is a huge jump up in difficulty compared with the rest of the game, so be prepared for it - I was wiped out in one hit the first time I jumped in unprepared and needed to level up a little before going back in and tackling the final boss again. I did think though that this was the best combat in the whole game - the final bosses attack sequences definitely kept my fingers rampaging, switching out my weapons from guns to melee, from offensive magic to defensive to protect myself and heal / buff my party and so on.

The ingame artwork is not that bad, but not that great either - there are some really cool character designs and some nice environments, but nothing that I thought was amazing. Particle effects are also pretty simple.

Overall I didn't mind the game, It didn't blow my mind though. The weapon and armor collecting and the levelling up of your super moves where definitely the saving grace and kept me playing through to the end where I was intrigued just a little by the story. If your an rpg freak like I am, you'll probably by the end be compelled to check out the sequel which carries on where this one ends.
It's a good bedtime game not too stressful just a casual dungeon grinder - an hour or 2 before bed will see you finish the game in a couple of weeks. I think i finished it in about 35 or so hours.

Overall I give the game a 6 out of 10 :)

I picked up the collectors edition of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together and am playing that at the moment, so will make a writeup about that once I get finished.

Female Faces Part 2

So firstly I’ll throw down some sensational reference material while I remember to share it - I strongly suggest picking these books up and bookmarking these sites if you really want to get into studying hair and the female face, and how makeup is used to either enhance / change the planes of the face or even completely eliminate some features! Along with all kinds of interesting theories and of course a lot of full page face close-ups.

Face Forward - Kevyn Aucoin

Making Faces - Kevyn Aucoin

For Hairstyles I usually hit: here or here

Once you start really getting into all this, you start to get the sensation that all of these things more or less go together. Good makeup takes the natural features of the face and works with it, highlights the good parts and compensates for others. It works with the skin, eyebrows, eye color, the eye lashes, the shapes and contours of the nose, lips, brow, cheekbones etc etc and of course it’s all framed by a hairstyle.

So Hair....

Essentially a big part of the hairstyle choice has to do with the shape of the face, and the personality of the character. It’s a big silhouette impacter (I’m constantly making up words its epic), and can often be one of, if not the most standout and memorable feature of a female character.

So again go back into doing a craptonne of serious 'looking'
Grab a whole bunch of possible hairstyles you like, then take a front view of your model and dump it into PS and start drawing some rough shapes to match the ones you like, you’ll quickly see that some hairstyles or volumes just work better than others mainly due to the shape of the face you chose.

click

Once you’ve got your hairstyle chosen out, what I do is build a few rough shells in Maya to basically give an overall volume at the back front and sides it’s pretty rough really - feels dirty to show… but hey!

click

It really shouldn’t take long to build this stuff - just extrude edges like a maniac until you’ve got something you like - then throw it straight into zbrush and start smooshing those shells around to further shape it and move it into something more like you wanted. Once I get to that point with those basic shells, I move to the next level of detail and the front part of the face the fringe etc.

I basically make some smaller strands using the same edge extrude method - maybe 4 or 5 thinner wispier lengths and shapes to begin with and I throw those into zbrush and start duplicating and placing them around to build up more volume and shape - I prefer to do this in zbrush because is super easy to quickly shape all the strands by polygroup using the move tool.

While it looks like a huge jump from the last image to this one, it’s really not - it’s a simple process of taking a few more strands and duplicating, then moving them into place and smooshing them round - If you look closely you can see I’ve just duplicated the hell out of the same strands! The entire fringe is basically one strand, duplicated and moved, smooshed around, and same goes for almost all the rest of the hair volume.

http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2010/181/3/6/The_Twins_Project_WIP_3_by_HyperDivine.jpg

It probably shouldn’t take more than a couple hours to reach this point if you’re in the zone.

Important note: In my infinite wisdom I didn’t actually realize until fairly recently that it’s a good idea to unwrapped those strands straight before you send them to zbrush and start messing with them :P So make sure you do that if you plan to use this as your final hair shape.

I’m not going to go into how to texture hair, there’s good tutorials out there about that – hell here’s two:

click
click

The other thing I’d like to hit in this part is the eyelashes because they are essentially the exact same approach, I make one eyelash and then duplicate that in zbrush and place them around the lids. I haven’t yet actually attempted to go full on cinematic style so ill generally use a much thicker lash at the base and far fewer strands - as readability is generally more important than accuracy for a game style character, even for a next gen hero unless you’re getting RIGHT up close to the eye. I will typically only do this for an approximation to help get a better feel for the whole face in zbrush though, I will generally paint some eyelashes on to an eyelash shaped single sided plane for the actual game model.

Zbrush
click

Game
click

Some important notes about this though, if you’re going to try go for all those strands in there, eyelashes always look more natural when they are kind of clumped together at the tips and maybe even like so:

click

I personally think it looks fake / weird / strange when eyelashes are all the same length, same curve, spaced out the same etc etc:

click

Lastly the eyebrows are also a key part of what goes into making an attractive eye area, they can throw the whole package out of whack so easily (as can most of the parts tbh) thicker eyebrows can give a youthful appearance while thinner brows can often make the face look more mature. Getting the arch correct is another key too.

Some good info here as well as the two books I mentioned at the start.

click

Nice Eyebrow :)

click

Lastly here is an awesome reference gallery for crazy eye makeup:

click

I'll go into how I tackle my eye textures in the next part.....

Tackling the Female Face Part 1

Ive ripped this straight from my thread at Polycount which can be found here:

I thought I would post it here as well so I can keep track of it :)

CLICK

Tackling the Female Face part 1:

For any face that I'm about to undertake I do hours of serious 'looking' first. I look at photos and pieces of concept art that I find visually appealing. I spend time surfing deviant art, flicker etc etc for female faces and I often look back through my own massive image bank of female face reference photos.

This kind of serious looking I find helps in multiple ways, sometimes you’ll find new photographers, new artists that you like etc, also it gets the gears in your mind ( whether you realize it or not ) working, your brain is actually taking in all of those images, and the more you consume during this time that’s relevant the better.

I always tend to prefer the extreme photos, because I find every idea tends to ( at some degree at least ) get watered down and loose impact.

What I mean by extreme photos is, let’s say you want to create a really wicked set of makeup on this chick - then don’t bother with just pics of makeup that looks average on a average looking chick, look for a chick wearing makeup that makes you go ' holy shit! ' that very sensation is the wave you want to be riding when your 'looking'.

You’re Moms Makeup:
CLICK

Holy Shit Makeup:
CLICK

Your mom’s lips:
CLICK

Holy Shit Lips:
CLICK
CLICK

You get the point....

Also without a doubt, every time I do this I pick up nuances that I like to try and capture that I didn’t see / notice before, it’s like a never-ending reward system that keeps giving the more you look and the more you put it into practice - its super addictive.

Once I'm through that stage I’ll get straight into sculpting in zbrush - I have a fairly average head base mesh that I use, it kinda looks like a generic and somewhat naive 'poser' looking head, though I think I will start to not use this anymore as I’m afraid my faces may start to look derivative over the long term and it’s always good to build things from scratch as it keeps your knowledge up and encourages you to 'go back to basics' as it were.

For the actual process, I ALWAYS start at a low subdivision and work my way up. getting as much as possible out of the lower before moving to the higher - I’ll always be jumping back and forward between these especially if I can push or refine something more.

It’s at this point I make the decision on whether i want to go for a more realistic or stylized approach.

Idealized Realistic:

CLICK
CLICK

Idealized but Stylized Exaggeration:

CLICK
CLICK

I tend to hover somewhere in between which seriously, isn’t a good thing at all and something I need to work on - but I think it’s been a necessary step in my evolution.

Once I’ve got a rough idea of the proportions and stylization of the face I’m looking for, it becomes a process of refinement. I'll break each feature down and work on it for maybe 15 min at a time, lips, eyes, nose, whole face, then lips, eyes, nose, whole face - always zooming right out and paying very special attention at the outset to the profile and the front view, once those 2 views are beginning to take shape, it’s all about giving volume to those features which is where you begin to focus on your 3/4 view.

When I’m working on any given feature I can’t stress enough how important it is to be constantly looking at it from every possible angle, trust me, you’ll find an angle it looks weird, fix it asap. Also aside from having your favorite sculpting matcap, get into the habit of constantly be changing it for inspections while you work, it’s like instantly changing your lighting and can really highlight problem areas with forms.

Once you get into this micro-building flow of constructing the face, you’ll see it all starts coming together - I keep doing this loop of lips, eyes, nose and the whole face ( relationship between all of them ) until I can see that its going in the right direction.

Your typical 'pretty' female face is the opposite of a male face, in that I mean you can keep adding and building up forms and cutting lines into a male face and it just keeps getting cooler and gnarlier, more weathered, more epic - a process of addition. But a female face is all about smoothing instead of chiseling, rounding out forms instead of defining them, it’s about adding strokes as mass, and then polishing them into a nice appealing shape - more akin to a process of subtraction.

You can see particularly in a lot of the eastern games / anime etc where their male characters end up taking on androgynous and effeminate qualities, when they switch the principals from addition to subtraction for the males as well, you get guys that look more girly than guy'y:

CLICK

But Western Fellas too:

CLICK

You questioned your sexuality for a microsecond or more looking at that pic of Bill just above didn’t you, it makes you feel uncomfortable doesnt it! *evil laughter echoes* ....don’t lie.

Anyway, *cough* I digress:

Once the sculpt reaches a point where I know it’s going the right way, I stop and go straight into polypainting mode. I always start with the eyes - easily the most important part of any female character - get these right and it will light the way for the rest of the face. I absolutely always look up reference again at this point, searching for sultry Smokey eyed reference and or pieces of stylized concept art that hyper-realizes 'the look' you’re going for.

Remember again that all the reference I use don’t necessarily have to be images that I simply want to replicate, but the emotion or sensation of ' fuck that’s awesome ' is what I look for, and it’s in that, that I find inspiration.

I'll polypaint the face because at this point it gives me a brand new perspective on the forms and direction I’ve chosen. I usually don’t spend any more time than a couple of hours doing this - it doesn’t have to be fancy - just enough to reaffirm that I made the right choices. Sometimes at this point I can fuck it up and I realize I need to go back and rework some stuff. So I'll do that and then come back to the painting.

My Chun Li for brawl is a perfect example of this:

CLICK

To this:

CLICK

Looking back and reflecting - I think I made the choice that I always tend to make and ended up pushing her to a more boring / grey area rather than running with the weird mousey stylisation and pushing that stuff even further. Hopefully I'll be able to break out of this in the near future.......

Once I’m happy with the polypaint ill often go into photoshop and start painting over a screengrab - playing with things like a matching hairstyle volume, eye makeup style, lipstick style and basically the colors of stuff to find something that I like. I hate to use this pic to illustrate because I really hate the look of this face now but its a good ilustration of what I'll tend to noodle around with at this point, in thise case some simple eye color completely transforms her persona:

CLICK

If that all goes awesome, I basically go back to sculpting and attempt to realize the face to the best of my abilities using that same approach of moving from one area to another always remembering to jump back and see the face as a whole.

And that’s pretty much how I tackle the base sculpt for all my girls faces with some other random nonsense thrown in there to ponder :)

TLDR:

1) Do some serious 'looking'.
2) Only pick the photographic or concept extremes for your reference.
3) Get straight into sculpting and creating.
4) Break the head down into the lips, eyes, nose and the face as a whole and get into the cyclic rhythm of tackling these regions 15 min at a time each.
5) When it starts to take shape, stop and jump straight into polypainting.
6) Jump to photoshop and start playing with colors and makeup styles and choices.
7) If everything is satisfactory, go back and refine your sculpt until your happy.

I'll write more about this in Part 2.

Rubi Malone Fan Art

Havent posted anything on here in ages - but theres some rather large changes on the horizon that I really want to write about really soon.

For now im just going to blast out a piece that I finished a while ago:

She varies from 13 - 18k tris depending on what shes wearing / weilding.
And the source maps are 2 x 2048.

I built her in Max, textured in photoshop, baked in xnormal, and these images are viewport screengrabs from my max viewport taken at 5000 pix and shrunk down.

The beauty shot however has my dodgy hair paintover in photoshop heh.

Shoutouts go to Haikai for letting me use his Desert Eagles model and Textures ( in her holsters ) for the beauty shot! And to Xoliul for letting me use the Xoliul 2.0 Shader in its Beta phase!

4th in Polycount Brawl!

I got 4th place in Polycounts Compition with my Chun Li!

4th Place!

Also totally stoked that I came 4th with my favourite stage of the competition!

Polycount Brawl Competition

So I've been really slow at keeping this updated man, TERRIBLE!

But here goes!

Rift has Launched, its doing extremely well, in fact much much better than what i ever possibly imagined. Im not sure if there are any number officially released yet so i will only say that we are doing *EXTREMELY* well.

I mean what company do you know of recently that launched an MMO, and then instead of sacking and letting go of a bunch of staff, is hiring up a storm, and expanding at an extremely rapid rate!!

We must have done something right!!!!

I entered a friendly competition, with no prizes over at Polycount called Brawl!

Basically we had to take a fighter from any fighting game, and recreate them in our own way.

I instantly chose Cammy, but then changed to Chun Li about an hour after, so lucky because Bogdan would have totally pwned my Cammy LOL!

Anyway here are my results:


I used the Xoliul viewport shader to grab these screenshots - really love that shader!

Was so glad to get her finished, its always a challenge to redesign a character but try to keep the iconic features about them present.

I was asked to submit some high res images by the kind people at Xbox 360 World Magazine in UK so they can print Chun Li on the next issue, so I hope to see her in there :)

Also I managed to get an absolute metric tonne of freelance requests - it really is amazing what happens when you create artwork. You reach a point where your artwork just takes care of you, and while I never EVER take what im about to say for granted, it is very hard for me to believe that there are no jobs, and no opportunities out there, you just have to get in, do the work and get your results out there. Rinse and repeat over and over and over again, eventually youll get to a point where your art will take care of you too :)

Everything has been absolutely insane in the last few weeks, I hope to tell a bit of a story very soon, but right now its a bit too early :P

Demand!

So, some pretty big news - thought I'd better update here as well!

I got promoted at work! I'm now the Lead Character Artist on RIFT, the Next Generation MMORPG created by Trion Worlds, in Redwood City California.

RIFT TVSPOT

It’s been an epic last year, and kind of ironic that roughly this time 1 year ago I was in Australia just hearing about my successful job application and getting my visa's all into place!

I honestly don’t know where the last year went!

But for the boring part of this entry I wanted get down something that’s been on my mind lately.

Right at the end of last year, I posted a journal on my deviantart http://hyperdivine.deviantart.com/journal/37256401/

There’s a line there which says: ‘I think this year is going to be awesome for me art-wise, I can feel it!’

I only had 3 days of peace, until the 4th of January.....
All of a sudden it was ON.

I got promoted, I got job offers coming in, miniature sculpting requests, character modeling requests, potentials, possibilities and opportunities were pouring our of nowhere!!! On top of this I already had a sculpture that im working on for Kingdom Death, and a friendly art competition with a couple of other insane artists, which I definitely stand to learn the most from!!! Brain explosion, seriously!

I just feel so much demand that, its pretty overwhelming. It’s a good feeling, but at the same time it’s pretty taxing! My ultimate end / dream goal would obviously be to be able to create my own art, my own worlds and characters, hopefully for others to enjoy! Along with my intermediate goal of being one of the best female character artists in the world. The thing that’s tricky is, with all these potential opportunities on the table, it does get tough deciding which ones to shove aside and which ones to pursue.

Pursuing all is absolute folly, I was young once, trust me - this plan of attack never ends well.

So that’s where I'm at, trying to decipher which opportunities are going to help me achieve what I want to achieve end goal wise, I know ill get there, my track record is pretty damned good if I do say so myself.

When I look back really quickly at my life so far it goes something like this.

Around 5 years old: Had first computer - played games instantly.

10: Starting to program and make graphics for games. Decided I needed money to fuel games – set goal to get job.

15: GOAL SUCCESS: Had multiple part time jobs to fuel habits! Was drawing constantly, and still making games but playing a hell of a lot of games, schoolwork suffering drastically, hated school. Set goal to get a real job and leave school.

16: GOAL SUCCESS: Quit school, Straight into Graphics Design job, earning lots of money doing a creative job to help fuel my gaming passion.

21: Quit graphics design, relocated to Australia. Set Double Goal: to finish a game related qualification, to be working in the games industry.

23: DOUBLE GOAL SUCCESS: Finished my Diploma and opened my own studio with the help of my future wife. Landing impressive character art contracts for developers around the world, was able to fully support myself and wife living in some really nice parts of town for 3 years on freelance work. This is where I kind of decided I want to make characters for games - Blizzard / Arenanet here I come. Another double goal: to work in-house and get studio experience & ultimately to work at Blizzard or Arenanet.

26: GOAL SUCCESS: Took an in-house Job @ Fuzzyeyes on the game Edge of Twilight for ps3 / 360. (this was ultimately for resume, to show I could work freelance and in-house) Also had many discussions with my best friend about how I wanted to work on a fantasy MMOs. Set goal to work on fantasy MMO.

29: Started doing freelance work again, miniature sculptures and character art for other games companies, and finally getting a chance to go to blizzard! 6 years after setting my sights on blizzard, THEY contacted ME! And I passed the art test!!!! So I didn’t get the job?! Who cares man! Blizzard contacted ME! Badass!!! GOAL SUCCESS I ended up relocating to the US and working on a Next Generation MMORPG Rift anyway which despite it being a startup and a company on nobody’s radar at all is actually a pretty awesome place, with great people, and most of all awesome developers, who know wtf they are doing, super valuable experience gained here!

30: Here I am, the big 30 - Still haven’t hit my goal of Arenanet or Blizzard, but I've helped launch a fantasy next gen mmo, and been promoted to Lead Character Artist of that mmo, and I’ve hit pretty much every goal I’ve set myself.

35: Wow my mind boggles about where I will be in 5 years time….. I wonder!!!!

Taking one day at a time, keep working on my art, keep absorbing knowledge, watching movies, experiencing new things, trying new things, helping other artists and hopefully working out what to push aside for the things that are in better alignment with my goals.

I'm telling you guys, this year is going to be an absolute cracker. Some crazy shits going to go down for me in one way or another I just know it, I got that feeling!

Thanks for reading if you got this far, cyber-cookies for you.

I have to add some art every time, so ill post up the WIP of my current character :)

Its been a while since I updated this!

So much has happened, and times blown past so quickly - I'm also loosing track of how many places I upload my work. Too many awesome forums out there!

Firstly I finished my Comicon 2010:


Quite dissapointed with the end result to be blunt about it - I know I can do so much better than this, but its all I could manage in so little time off during the competitions duration. But onward to improovement!

I went to Blizzcon 2010 and stayed with SlipgateCentral and Firstkeeper for the 4 days that we were down there. It was totally awesome in every way. Vadim showed us around Blizzard campus, inside and out - what a dreamland. Here we are out front with Vadim and Thrall watching over all of us.



Just finished a major milestone at work, so will have some breathing room to chip away at some of my own artwork again. Ive got some awesome things lined up in the near future, and some crazy opportunities popping up that I never thought I would have.

In no paticular order:

1) A gentlemens duel with Gavin Goulden and Spark. <-- cant wait for this. I got some crazy ideas for my next girl!

2) A large curvy girl Sculpture for Kingdom Death. <- started this already.

3) Possibly more stuff for Monty Oum. If you dont know who Monty Oum is - Your missing out, trust me ( I wont provide any links, if your curious, google 'Dead Fantasy' )

The game I've been working on for the last year has gone into closed Beta and its receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback so far. http://www.riftgame.com/en/

I cant wait until it launches!!

Thats about it for now, need to get more time for drawing into my day!!

Revamped Valkyrie

So I reached a point where I felt like I was flogging a dead horse, I accepted that I could do better and threw the sculpt away except for the body underneath. A substantial waste of time given that id only have 5 weekends to make her from scratch, throwing away one of those weekends was a pretty big blow - 2 weekends left after this one.

6 days left to finish her!

Heres where she curently sits now. I'm feelin this much more than I was before!


Im pretty much moving into the final mesh, will add all the scrolling and etching and embroidery in her stockings in the textures and crazy bump that stuff.

Onward.

Blog Revamp & Comicon 2010

Gone are the dreary dark days of old, it was high time to brighten up the place!

I added a bunch of folks on the right hand side - some are my friends but all are inspiration for me on my journey. I've no doubt left many of you out, so drop me a line or a kick in the face if and ill remedy it asap!

I entered comicon 2010 with my entry Valkyrie. I'll be doing a younger / more eastern styled Valkyrie but I'm hoping she will still read as the heroine she has always been.

Here is my latest WIP of her so far:


I plan to be much more active here on my blog - I would like to treat this as more of a development journal fom this point onward!

In the persuit of compelling beauty

So, Im finally setup in the US with my PC again.

I dont feel like boring myself, or anyone for that matter with the details of that!

But I wanted to write about a new kind of goal which I think I uncovered as a personal passion of mine. I have for the longest time found much more challenge in the female form, than in the male or crazy organic forms.

Its the refinement process, the simplification of forms, lines and shapes that make beauty... beauty. Its so hard to master, and chasing it is such a thrill, every new piece excites and propels me forward to do more and more.

Ultimately, My goal is to be one of the best female character artists in the world.

Woah! - hefty goal right... but I think it will be good for me to put this out there into the void.

I feel a good 90% + of female game characters fall into the category of being there only for the male gamer to oggle - rather than be strong, beautiful or compelling characters in and of themselves. Theres nothing wrong with that either, but I hope to be an artist that adds to the 10% side and create female characters that arent just oggle material.. but I want to create something more than that - and I want that to come across in my work.

Pretty simple but insanely challenging and exciting for me to have discovered this!

Im working my first new piece for quite some time...

Twins.

Im lucky because I get to create!

Sometimes when people ask me what I do, it feels a little awkward. I reply ' My job title is character artist, I make characters for games. '

Most people who dont know are like.. 'ahhh' and thats where the conversation ends. Which is cool, I dont mind that !

But it made me think, if I ever got the chance to describe what it is that I think about when im creating characters, I'd have so much to say that I would probably put people to sleep!

I'm going to try to write down a few things that games that I've worked on required me to think about.

Persona's - does this character look like he or she speaks ? who is the voice actor ? do we even have sound for this character ? what does he / she do ? if someone saw this character would you say straight away what he / she is ? does he / she move in a way that fits the characters overall demeanor ?

Just that section in itself is massive, but beyond identifying the character itself...

Surroundings - does the character look like it fits with his / her surroundings ? are the environments reflective in his / her clothes, level of grubiness / dirtyness ? or the opposite social stature. Does he / she fit in with upper class neighborhood ? Does where this person lives contain items and trinkets that ground this character into the reality of the fantasy of this game ?

Basically does it all fit together?? does it look right ? feel right ? Thats what an awesome character does. It just belongs.

People who create games these days, think about so many things on so many levels, its really insane. We have people who think about fashion, composition, physics, geography, science, literature, socialogy, economics even philosophy.

The games industry hires, cinematographers for camera placement and transitions, we hire fashion designers to design outfits, we hire expert musicians and symphonic orchestras.

We even hire scientists and field experts for advice on whether or not the terrain makes geographical sense... ie if the mountain range is along here, it would make sense the stream running here would meander this way and that, and that on this side of the valley the trees would be sligtly leaning because of the natural easterly winds etc etc etc ....... damnnnnn.

I mean its getting really really insane the level of depth of thought that goes behind creating the artwork that populates our worlds - but most people honestly have no clue of this.

Is it necessary ? im not sure - probably something that could be debated with pretty strong cases for either side, most notably for the level of immersion created by portraying something 'realistic'.

Does anyone ever notice the rockslide pile of rubble here - is there because it makes sense that THAT is where a rockslide might have occured due to its geographical location ? Or do people just think sweet nice rockslide... wheres the bad guys im supposed to shoot ?

Ive always been one for marvelling at the characters and worlds created by the best developers. And just how well they all go together. Man they blow my mind on a neverending basis. Shadow of the collosus's world blew my mind. Final Fantasy always blows my mind. Silent Hill blows my mind, Resident Evil blows my mind. Doom 3 even blows my mind, all pretty different games, different styles but so 'fitting' for what was trying to be portrayed.

Anyway all this stuff is just so exciting, that really the games industry is just brilliant, even though my part is just one small piece of these massive puzzles that I work on - 1 game, any game is a massive undertaking, and a wicked balancing act of many passionate professionals producing something together as a team.

So when I tell people I work in the games industry and they go " ohhhh " but really have no idea, i just kind of nod and smile, tell myself that my life is incredibly exciting, absolutely full of real world problems to solve and overcome on a daily basis, and very very..... 'abnormal' and honestly I couldnt possibly imagine doing anything else!

Im working on a sculpture of Fran from FF XII... only 2 weeks to finish her... uh-oh!

If you had one moment to grab everything you wanted - would you take it ?

Think about this for just one second. Imagine while you read this, about having no worries in the world, no money problems, and all the time in YOUR lifetime to spend doing something. What would it be ? If given this chance, would you take it ?

I would choose to be a Character Artist, yup call me mental, but even if I had all the money in the universe and never needed to worry about a thing, I would still arrange my life so I could enjoy creating character art, and I would do the best I could to help others realise that they could do the same thing with whatever they choose as well.

I know that like anything in this world, there is a price to pay for good things. Im not talking about money - I'm talking about balance, doing something in exhange for something else.

Now, bare with me for second, while I get all cooky on you.

This world and this universe wastes nothing. Everything is used, and for every action there is consequence. What I mean by this, is simple, we only need to take a look into nature all around us. Nature is programmed genetically to waste nothing, the next time your outside put a sweet on the ground, or a piece of bread. Whether you are in the city or in the country, in a short amount of time that bread will be covered in insects, or a bird will fly away with it, it will use this piece of nourishment to fulfill its purpose in the harmony of things. It will nourish itself and others, in order to reproduce, a byproduct of which can be so many things, including the things that humans eat! Honey, Flour, vegetables, meats, dairy products, every organism does what it does, and gives back something in return, in order to maintain the balance of things.

Enter the human being. Unfortunately for us, we have the power of choice. The rest of earths inhabitants arent blessed with this ultimately powerful gift.

What a gift it is.

Choice.

Unlike the insects and animals, unlike the trees and the birds, and unlike the universe, YOU have a choice. You can choose to use the time you have, to nourish yourself and others in your own way thus giving back, or you can choose to be wasteful and give back very little compared with what you take.

Every day you are alive, this universe is giving you a chance to make a choice. Something no other organism gets. None of us get very long in the grand scheme of things, so when you think about that - it seems so stupid and wasteful to give the universal law of nature the finger and simply choose to consume, without giving back.

Choose to give back, in your own way!

It could be making someone near you feel better, it could be planting trees, it could be choosing not to eat fast food, it could be choosing to tackle your passion and go back to school to be a scientist, it can be choosing to take that ONE opportunity to have everything you ever wanted.

Every day you DO have that choice, its right in front of you.

I didnt say it would be easy however, like everything in nature there is no easy way from point a to point b, for every series of actions there are consequences to balance the equations.

Ill use myself for the rest of this example:

I choose to be a Character Artist, no matter what may happen. I choose to give back by sharing my experiences in the best way that I can. To help not waste my time, I choose to pass on my knowledge, ideas and expressions in hope that others can learn, benefit and grow from my characters, my words, my art or my poor spelling! Its my way of balancing the equation for all the consuming im doing!

Remember how I started this Blog entry ?

Would you choose to grab everything you wanted if it was offered to you ?

Well you do have this chance, to have everything you ever wanted, every day you wake up you have the chance to make that insane crazy happiness a reality.

This is not some crazy joke from a silly character artist. Its the law - I didnt make the law thats just how it IS. The proof is everywhere you look:

Action: People continue to choose not to take action and instead believe its impossible to have everything they want.

Consequence: 95% of people have normal jobs believing that winning the lotto will solve all their problems.

Action: People take action, forge a path and apply themselves wholly to their passion, whether it is right or wrong.

Consequence: These are the superstars of fame or even notoriety! Of any trade and from any background, and from any time in history, these people are Bill Gates to Michaelangelo, Albert Einstein to Genghis Khan.

These are the creators of history, good and bad you have the choice to be like these people there are heroes and villians to mimic - just to cater for all folk, though I hope for the good of us all there arent to many aspiring villians amongst you!

You too have an opportunity every day to be and to get whatever you want from your life, there are no exceptions. You just need to put in or give back an equivalent to what you want, you need to maintain that balance. You didnt think the universe would give you everything if you just sit there do you ?

The real question is not whether you would choose to have everything if it was offered to you, but, are you prepared for the consequences of being given such an opportunity?

Of course, despite me writing this, nature has deemed fit to ensure that YOU can CHOOSE to believe and take action, or not. :)

A character I recently finished!

California!

Its been some time since I made my last post, so I thought its about time to blurt out some more ramblings.

Firstly myself and my partner Steph both picked up Jobs at Trion world Network in Redwood City, California! So we are just awaiting our Visa's before heading off to join those wicked folks over there to work on the MMO : Heroes of Telara. The art team there is bursting with talent, some of the guys there have been on my inspiration list for so long and I never knew they actually worked there. AWESOME SURPRISE!

The downside is selling off everything we have accumulated, and sorting out what to relocate and what to sell or gift to family / friends.

Now we wait for our visa applications to go through, and due to neither of us having art degree's this process becomes a whole different beast.

To cut that story short, what should only take a couple of weeks, could potentially blow out to be months long, so while we wait it out we are lucky enough to be working from home, here in Australia on Heroes of Telara. We are both so thankful that the folks of Trion World are willing to do whatever they can to help us get to the US.

On to more art related thoughts...

I am learning Maya as thats what Trion is using - its quite a bit diferent to max straight out of the box. Firstly its definately not to friendly in the sheer ' get in and start modelling ' department. The modelling tools are lacking some really basic functionality that ive been pampered with over the years using 3dsmax. the UVW editor is pretty ordinary as well.

Im hoping as time goes on and with more practice I will be able to get back up to a good production speed using Maya. The one good thing so far is im learning something new!

Now for something really crazy, I have been thinking lately after seeing documentaries on TV, reading books about old artists and whatnot and im beginning to see a pattern between amazing artists and their often extreme appearances, or extreme ways of life.

They often seem eccentric in appearance and in manner, or some even live out in the wilderness in peace where they can concentrate in peace. I think their minds are so used to delving into the depths of the mental unknown and trying to reproduce what they find in their artwork that other more 'social' aspects can / often fall by the wayside.

Im not saying all artists are anti social, just that the really great ones are often very 'extreme' in some way, whether its rediculous clothes, tatoos, piercings etc etc its all very individualistic.

I guess in a way, if your an aspiring artist trying to find your way, you only really need to do what these guys have done and are doing right now, which is look inside yourself. Who you are is RIGHT THERE, not in magazines, not in movies, not in the tabloids. Its there youll find your individualism or your style, and its there where you may find the juicy tidbits of artistic development that keep you going back for more. MAYBE its that process that eventually finds great artists somewhat removed from the normalities of society.

New Website and some more thoughts!

Here I am again, with some more random thoughts and feelings about Character Artist stuff.

But before I get to that, checkout my new website: http://www.kalescentstudios.com/troyfolio/Main.htm

I'll hopefully have some more characters to go up there soon!

So recently I've been doing a few things differently, I've began to return to my fantasy roots and started reading more books before I goto sleep, Bob Salvatore is a brilliant writer and I think what he does for writing about amazing characters, is what i hope to become for being able to visually create characters.

My overarching goal more than anything else is that I hope to one day reach a level of character artistry whereby people see more than a character, but the see a real persona, someone that could actually be somewhere in some world we dont know about.

I hope to tell stories through a single frame or render, without any words. Break past the simple confides of a 'game character' or simply a '3d character' and have people looking at the image and go wow I wish I could read about her exploits as an adventurer, or wow id love to see more of this guy, his companions, his world.

I want to assault viewers with so much character that they cannot help but feel compelled to stare at the image and wonder.

This is what Bob's writing does for me, so I will continue to Read before bed, I also sleep much much better than I have been lately so thats an extra bonus!

You know what game contains artwork that gives me this sensation right now ? Diablo 3.

http://us.blizzard.com/diablo3/?rhtml=y

God just look at it, words fail me when I see the graphics of this game. Im utterly gobsmacked at what these guys have managed to achieve. Its a level of artistry that no other game company, not even square enix has achieved (in my oppinion) and for those that know me well, im a huge huge FF fanboy, but this... man this is in a new league for me.

When you see environment concept art thats fantastic, masterpiece quality, its usually consisting of a harmony of value, saturation and temperature that leads your eye to explore the world in that picture, you can get lost finding things you never thought was in there if you look again. Well that Harmony is in diablo - realtime. It looks so painterly, so close to a masterwork of colour theory that no other game has achieve yet.

Okay so its not a CRAZY or BOLD style, like cell shading, or toon shading or even black and white shading etc which is cool, but painters spend their whole lives learning to paint like the old masters, and here we have a game, coming up thats headed in that same direction and its damn near got it!!!

Sheer Brilliance.

Lastly I wanted to mention something about 'realistic models' and what this means to me. This is paticularly for all those folks that like to instantly discredit a character artist on his or her designs.

Ive read alot of comments on artwork like ' Theres no way he could weild that sword ' or ' why is she wearing nothing but a g-string into battle ' and I wanted to share my viewpoint on this common argument.

Superman is the man of steel, hes in a blue and red Leotard with a cape. If you looked at any man anywhere on this planet and he was dressed in that suit youd think he was nutz.

Not superman though, why is that ? Because we know hes the man of steel, hes bulletproof, can fly uber fast, and has massive superhuman strength. Even though he doesnt LOOK like any of these things.

One freeze framed image of superman doesnt TELL you hes bulletproof we just KNOW he is from all the stories, all the comics, all the depictions of him.

Yet the principle is still the same. If I took the image and character design of superman at pure face value with no history or knowledge I would say flatly, Im sorry but that is the worst design I've ever seen, hes going to fight 5 henchman each with an AK47 and hes attempting to defeat them in a colourful leotard,....... hes SOOoo boned.

So next time a brilliant artist creates a character, and your going to shoot the design down try to think a little outside the box and skip all the most obvious things such as pure face value comments and get to the REAL design issues to try help the designer!

Lastly as per custom, an image or 2! Some anatomy practice from 2d to 3d and a miniature sculpture i recently finished!

Fundamentals, Fundamentals, Fundamentals.

Another epiphany recently that I felt compelled to make notes of, so once again here I am just writing whatever im thinking / feeling.

'Game Character Artist'

Say those words, and try to think about what those words mean to you, if you are reading this and if you are, or want to be a Character Artist in the future, what do those words mean to you?

What these words USED to mean to me, was that I made characters for games. It was so simple clean cut - I build the inhabitants that populate the worlds found in games.

Now, I no longer believe those words hold such a simple meaning for me. I dont know really what changed that, though I definately know that the meaning is much much deeper now.

The title needs to be earned, on a fundamental level.

I can say I make game characters, but unfortunately I dont believe I am worthy of the title game character artist.

I was never taught, or schooled in the fundamentals of art - and neither have I ever attempted to study the foundations of what would be relevant to a character artist for games or film today.

Whilst not fact, I can say with confidence that 99% of universities offering their degrees and courses with relevance to game character art - will not teach you fundamentals.

They will show you how to open 3dsmax, or maya, zbrush, mudbox, how to model in those programs, how to uvw map your character and create textures, and shaders, and maybe lighting and shadows - and also how best to present your characters for the purpose of securing a job and prepare you for the games industry.

NOW, this makes me almost sick in the stomach. Truly.

If I could somehow establish a school, and you choose to attend that school, and your chosen profession was to be a Game Character Artist then you wouldnt learn how to use any programs, you would learn fundamentals.

The curriculum would consist of at least 2 - 3 years of

1) Pencil / Paper Drawing.
2) Human Anatomy with pencil / paper.
3) Animal Anatomy with pencil / paper.
4) Colour theory.
5) Human Anatomy with traditional media.
6) Animal Anatomy with traditional media.

By now your thinking this is sounding much like a traditional art school - youd be correct. Thats exactly what it should be. The only thing that would be tacked on for maybe a final 6 months or maybe 1 year, are technical things, learning programs, learning the technical aspects of creating games characters.

This is because tools will come and go, and new ones will replace the old ones, and you can easily get caught up spending all your time learning tricks of the tools. And most likely you will spend the rest of your career in that nasty cycle of learning and adjusting to new programs and new tools. SO trust me, if you have your fundamentals BEFORE you get into that cycle youll ALWAYS be on top, and youll ALWAYS have job offers.

Currently new artists are being born into an age where fundamentals come second - and its plain wrong. I believe you arent worthy to call yourself a Game Character Artist if you dont have a fundamental understanding of creating character art.

Be humble about this, If you need to open zbrush, sculpt away, create normal maps, work up a shader, and create a nice lighting / shadow setup, need to composite layers of images into a fantastic final piece in order to get great result - its just an illusion, your layering technology on top of technology and allowing things that are often out of your control in the game development environment, to dictate the result of your art.

If that sounds like you, then you are in my boat, welcome!! Your not alone, unfortunately In my oppinion a good 95% of the 'Game Character Artist' are in this boat.

If you cannot take a piece of concept art, build a nicely constructed realtime mesh, create some nice uvw's and rely on purely your hand painting abilities to describe the shapes, forms and materials of your character, create a nice even lighting scheme then in my books, along with me, you cannot call yourself a character artist.

It doesnt matter if your job, career has never allowed you create hand painterly styled characters - thats just an excuse, get into the foundations, GET INTO LEARNING WHAT THE MASTERS LEARN.

I encourage you to seek out and find the artist lurking in the TOP game studios, find their names, find their folios, I dont mean great artists, I mean THE BEST OF THE BEST. I gaurantee that these guys have an understanding, it will be present in their folios, if not directly on display!

And why does it seem like only those guys get the good jobs ? well I've just described it above! These Game Character Artist's have the ability to use their skills to give flavour and style to their artwork, due to the great understanding of fundamentals. Whilst artists like me, need to rely on post process effects, shaders, and lighting , and photos to create good results. Stuff thats often not in our control, creating a strange kind of 'NOT WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET' development environment!!!!!

The number of Game Character Artists that do have it - is very exclusive - there could be less than 100 in the world, compared to the thousands and thousands employed. I myself know very very few ( in my oppinion of course ) who belong in that extraordinary league.

Here are a couple of those elite:

http://www.pioroberson.com/ <-- Now working in Blizzard.
http://www.benregimbal.com/ <-- Ex Ubisoft Montreal, been freelancing for 6 years.

All in all, I could liken this rediculous reliance on technology driven art to the failure of many games and game production cycles, and the frustration of many gamers PC's framerates suffering under the sheer weight of the technology driving these games.

Companies like Blizzard, Square Enix and ArenaNet / NCSoft, clearly have chosen to instead rely on the skills of these elite artists to create their game worlds and artwork. Raw artistic ability touched up slightly with simple lighting and some subtle post processes to stylise their worlds and its inhabitants.

They have got it right, they have got an understanding, and this allows them to create memorable artwork and memorable worlds, I would even go as far as saying unforgettable.

Fundamentals, I'm telling you, pleading even, to try and steer your way onto that path. So there you have it, if you want to be a Game Character Artist, and you fall into the category of not having that solid understanding, or at least practising it, I urge you to begin your journey. We can even do it together, drop me a line ! I feel like a total n00b again, but im looking forward to it, im hungry to learn.

And believe me, I want to be able to be worthy of the title 'Game Character Artist' do you ?

What is that little fire burning inside all of us?

Woah, what a day.

I've always known there was some kind of conflict going on with what REALLY motivates me and what I THOUGHT motivated me.

Today, with the help of a friend I was able to uncover something that will serve to be extremely valuable to the rest of my art life.

I'm going to attempt to describe what it is that I've discovered but beware, read at your own peril - this maybe long.

I've always been interested in games, specifically characters for games. I see them, I want to know more about them than what the game tells me. I wonder what they did before the game, who they are outside of the game - what they do when people aren't controlling them around the battlefield on their time off !!!!

But more specifically I've always had a keener interest in characters and worlds that have sprung out of the minds of those eastern folk.

All the signs have been in front of me for so so long but I haven't realised it! argh!

My games collection - 90% or higher eastern style artwork.
My art bookmarks - 90% or more eastern artists.

However STRANGELY enough I own no manga DVD's!

Now If I remove games from the equation and only talk about art, I think its best to describe my attraction in this way:

If there were 2 Art books for sale on a shelf, and those 2 Art books were say Prince of Persia 3, & Final Fantasy Versus XIII . Which one would I lunge for first ? It would be final fantasy every single time, no matter what I stack up next to it.

Prince of Persia 3 has amazing artwork, I love the way it looks and I adore the game.
But Final fantasy goes way beyond this simple attraction and here's how:

When I see the character concept of the Prince from Prince of Persia 3, I think, wow that's awesome, brilliant colours, great design, I love it. I break it down into artistic terms, instantly analyzing it and wondering how they reproduced such a thing in the game. I have an instant technical attraction to the artwork.

When I see character concepts of Final Fantasy, or Lineage, or Monster Hunter, or Aeon ( and honestly a lot of other Korean / Japanese / Chinese art and artworks or game companies) I see character designs that express themselves on the outside, through their hairstyle, their choice of clothing, the way they stand, the way they turn their heads or the way they walk. I haven't even begun to start analyzing the character because I'm totally drawn in to what I'm looking at!
I'm trying to work out is this guy evil, is he hiding something ? What the hell is up with the pink hair, nipple piercings and missing teeth ?! I'm completely overwhelmed by the characters 'character'. So overwhelmed that I haven't even begun to imagine how they are going to reproduce this in the game!

The main difference can be summed up by the simple fact that Asian style artworks, get my mind going. I see that style of character artwork, and I have a physical URGE to build it, I have an urge to start making art JUST LIKE IT. I simply don't get that from looking at assassins creed, or god of war, or gears of war - even though that stuff is all awesome, its just simply doesn't give me the slightest inclination to DO WORK or MAKE ART!

Another way to look at it is like this:

There's a tiny fire burning inside every artist, and whether or not they choose to fuel that or not is up to them. I thought I was fueling my fire, by making realistic models, big soldiers in armour, realistic humans, heroic knights etc but I wasn't, and haven't been. Though it was not a waste of time, far from it! All but one character I've ever worked on has been valuable experience, its just that they were not fueling my fire.

Last year, I built a character from Kingdom Hearts 1. I remembered how excited and how pumped I was to be going home from work to work on this character, I could have worked on her all day long so easily, Ive never felt like that about any single piece of art I've ever worked on.
Unfortunately at that time I failed to realise that she was fueling that little fire inside of me.

Here she is:



I still smile every time I look at her face, not because I'm admiring my work! Its because Kairi is the first character that I have put myself into.

So what does all this mean ? It means I'm going to start doing a lot more character work that's inline with what I really want to do, its more eastern style stuff, less western style.

I know as long as I keep fueling it, that little fire inside of me will grow until fire is pouring from my hands, my mind, my eyes, my toes and my soul, into my characters.

I hope to give each one a tiny fire, that will leap from the page into the viewers hearts, minds and souls and leave a lasting impression.

My fire is burning. It Begins.