Friday, 3 December 2010

Environmental Concepts - Mixing Matte-painting with 3D

To save time often instead of crating full 3d environments with every tree, hill, mountain textured in the background oten they combine photographic elements into the fray. Other mattepainters use the digital software to composite the photographic elements together rather than use the 3d software to create particular structures or objects.

Often artists create the environment concept in the following way foreground - 3d rendered, background - photomontage / mattepainting. Sometimes elements impossible to achieve wit photomontage in the backgrounds can even be added with 3d software.



Here is a selection of matte paintings by Wayne Haag, he implements a lot of 3d with photomontage. Often foreground buildings, vehicles and objects are created totally with 3d software and the rest with matte-painting techniques.




Leviathan and the art of keith Thompson

Leviathan takes place in an alternative history in world war 1, where steam punk weapons, vehicles and characters are common place. Especially useful research in relation to the collaborative project where we aim to implement a steam punk theme with a possibly unique take on it.



Link to Keith Thompsons website

Trailer for Leviathan Book Release:

Thursday, 2 December 2010

Possible Ideas for Projects

Concept Art
Character/vehicular concepts - Photoshop/Corel
Environment Concepts - Mattepaintings/3d render
Scenario Concept illustrations - Photoshop/Corel/3d Render

~ Concept art for a fictional video game of a steam punk art style

3d rendered Environment
~ Different context; non video game related, possibly competition brief.

Collaborative Project

Diary onboard a steam punk airship

Random Concepts

Here is a selection of seemingly random but very interesting conceptual illustrations. I’ve collected various galleon airship illustrations because this year I have been aiming to design and illustrate one myself for reasons unknown to me.














Tuesday, 30 November 2010

Further Environment Concepts + Matte-Painting!

3d software is ofcource not the only way of creating cocnept art, some artists go for a full digital painting or a mattepainting as shown below. Mattepaintings are essentialy photomontages mized with digital painting, it verys greatly between artists of how much is hand drawn gitially and how much is altered photographs. The two images below are primarily digitaly painted with some photographs merged in to add texture.





























Here is a classic example of a full mattepainting, it offers the oppurtunity to create an environement that could never exist is reality but at a photorealistic quality, more so than could ever be ahcieved with a 3d generated environment.
















Here is a link to his website with a in-depth look at the processes he took to create this matte-painting:


Video Game Concept Art

Video game concept art is also of interest to me, going through the various processes to formulate a character or vehicle is a very interesting and rewarding process.

Not only would this be an interesting project to test my skills of imagination but also it would help greatly in improving my anatomical drawing.

The two main forms of concept art in video games are character/ve
hicle concept, Environmental concepts and Scenario concept. Character and vehicle concepts tend to usually have the style of sketches and further developed and coloured designs over a whit background, sometimes with notes made by the artist pointing out important factors.






Scenario based Concept art
This form of video game concept art is aimed at showing characters and vehicle design in their appropriate context, such as in an environment to form a battle-scene. Sometimes these are shown to the game makers themselves, to push them further to attempt to match the quality/atmosphere on the concept in the game itself.

With this type of video game concept art style differ. Sometimes there simple digital speed paints (bottom right) similar to the character/vehicle concepts and other times their very in-depth 3d illustrations (bottom left).










It would be very interesting to embark on a project to design concept art for a fictional video game of my imagination. And try out all three forms of video game concept art, Time constraints would probably lead to only being able to achieve 1 or 2 of those aims however.

Half Life 2 Concept Art

Looking Forward

Concept art

I’ve always aimed from the first year to implement at least one major 3d generated illustration project into one of the modules. Over the past 4-5 years I have been learning the software and now I’m relatively confident that I can use it to its full potential and be able to create a illustration of the quality to be placed in a portfolio.

Characters for me are difficult to create through 2 dimensional artistic techniques, creating them in 3 dimensions is 100x harder and takes a great deal of time (which wouldn’t suit the tight deadlines of the module).

3D Environmental Concepts.

Raphael Lacoste is an artist that always come to mind when I think about 3d environment concepts. In recent years he’s more of a matte painter than a 3d environment artist, but his work in the 2000-2007 was purely 3 dimensional environment concepts for videogames.



From looking at his environment concepts it is obvious there is a lack of characters, this leads to question whether these images are telling a story and in-turn are they illustrations at all? Personally I believe images such as these do tell a story and that a lack of characters doesn’t detract from that. When I see the bottom right image I can see a lot of things; what happened in to this building? What caused that lantern to fall and those stones to collapse on the roof? Was there a battle or a landslide from the mountain? These images make you imagine yourself what happened instead of giving everything on a silver platter, as a result everyone interprets the image differently.

Constraints of such a project

Time is the greatest constraint of this sort of project, 3d artwork often takes longer to create than 2d artwork for the simple reason that everything has to be created in 3 dimensions. As a result I may have to constrain the environment to be prominently manmade structure because authentic organic landscapes such as grass, foliage etc also takes a great deal of time.


Often in 3d art the final piece is just one flat render, and texture applied to most areas of the 3d object/environment isn’t even visible on the final render. So in a sense to save time I could only texture and model aspects that would be visible in the final rendered image.

James and the Giant Peach - Front Cover Design

The main inspiration i drew from at the start of this project was the work of victorian illustrator Arthur rackham. He uses watercolour and inked lines to create beautiful tracitional illustrations.







































Below are two pages on initial sketches I made into the composition of the final piece. Originally (left part of image) I aimed at showing the exterior of the peach in mid air carried array by hundreds of seagulls from the hungry sharks below. This would have made a nice image but it would however not effectively show any of the characters as they are too far away and almost silhouette in appearance.

This led me to think of a way of showing all the major characters clearly, most covers show characters on the outside of the peach so i attempted a different approach with an interior scene of the peach.










Due to time constraints and the fact that i already new what style i wanted in the final peice i went straight into tjhe final production.


























Issues

One major issue during the final production was an issue of detail and resolution that occurred with the line work in stark comparison to the sharpness of the watercolour texture. Because I scanned the original line work and then laser printed it onto a3 where it was painted I effectively was degrading the quality of line work and further degrading it with the final scan of the painted version. To overcome this issue I applied various sharpening techniques on Photoshop including smart sharpen and paint dabs.

Adjustments that need to be made

The first adjustment that needs to be made is for the main 'James' character to be anatomically correct, his neck is too wide and long; also his left arm is tiny in comparison to the right.

The main title text could also be aligned to the right to coordinate with the diagonal shape of the peach coloured gradient.