References & Bibliography

Brinkman, R, (2008), The art and science of digital compositing: techniques for visual effects, animation and motion graphics, Burlington, Elsevier

Clarke, A and Mitchell, G, (2007), Videogames and art, Bristol, Interlect Books


Frazetta, F, Fenner, A and Fenner, C, (2007), Rough Work: Concept Art, Doodles, and sketchbook drawings, Underwood Books

Freeman, D, (2004), Creating emotion in games: the craft and art of emotioneering, New Riders Publishing

Hanson, M, (2005), Building sci-fi moviescapes: the science behind the fiction, Oxford, Focus Press


Isbister, K, Better game charaters by design: a psychological approach, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers

Le, K. Yamada, M. Yoon, F and Robertson, S, (2005), The skillful huntsman: visual development of a Grimm tale at Art Center College of Design, San Fransisco, Design Studio Press

Lee, B, (1975), TAO of JEET KUNE DO, Ohara Publications

Martiniere, S, (2010), Quantumscapes, Titan Books Limited

Plunkett, K, Le, T and Lo, W, (2010), BATTLE MiLK 2: Tangents and Transitions in Concept Art, SanFransisco, Design Studios Press

Sparth, (2010), Structura, Titan Books Limited

Wachowski, L. Wachowski, A. Lamm, S and Darrow, G, (2000), The Art of the Matrix, England, Newmarket Press

Walker, C, Walker, E and Kajala, J, (2005), Making a Game Demo:From concept to demo gold, Texas, Wordware Publishing


 Vaz, M, (2002), Behind the mask of Spider-Man: the secrets of the movie, University of California, Ballantine Pub Group

Final designs

After I had decided my final designs to be used and their backround environments, I played with the hues and lighting to get the effect I wanted. My goal was to produce at least a couple of designs which featured my character and my environment. I wanted to show emotion in the image as best I could, I agreed with Walker et al (2005) who states that "Since emotion is an element of gameplay, the concept artist has to create that element through visual representations" (2005:57). I chose the scene in my game where the protagonist escapes his pod to find everyone on the project dead.

Mood piece (No character)

With character...

Version 1

And the final piece...

Version 2

Conclusion:

Overall, I have learnt a lot in BA5 that I'm sure will come in very useful in my next projects such as the use of light/shadow and composition. I'm pleased at how my final pieces came out and I can see that my concept art has come a long way by looking other styles and ways of working.

End results

With the concepts finalised, I began to create mood sheets and style sheets showing the character in a number of poses and expressions. Although I found it difficult at first to draw the character from different angles, I found that the stronger the character began as a fully realised persona, the greater the feel I got for drawing him and the easier it became to draw him in a variety of ways....

Graphic style

With the character designed I began thinking more about the actual visual style of the game, would it have a cartoonish look? manga? comic book? I experimented with drawing my character in a few of the styles...

Who's inside the suit.

I began looking at pictures of people for reference, I didn't want to use an overly muscular square-jaw hero look and I didn't want a grim anti-hero either. The character was a man in his thirties who although has an amazing ability is a regular person. This is something that Spielberg has used in many of his films, his ethos is 'Ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances' as it makes the character far more relatable. So I looked at and drew faces to see if I found one that struck a cord...

I kept drawing faces and began to piece together a composite of different features and facial aspects that I liked into one face. Soon I had the look of the character that I wanted and I started work on giving him  a sense of personality by drawing him with different expressions, doing this also helped me get a feel for how the character would look as a whole in the game.

I wanted the character to have some unique aspect so I gave him a a small streak of white hair near his temple.

Colour and texture

While still not going into any detail of the face of the person under the suit I began experimenting with colour and texture of the suits. My first studies of the colour were interesting but made the suit more super-hero-like and I didn't want there to be too much of that sort of feel as I thought it would perhaps take from the reality and gravitas that I wanted to show. Tatopoulos (2004) agrees and states "For me, the design must have a grounding in the real world. We all make our own limits and I want to keep it as believable as possible" (2004:125)

I only went with darker hues because any use of too bright colours would be harder to realise and again I had to keep the suits function in mind.

Once I had a colour scheme I liked, I began to work on the finer details such as the textures, initially I wanted to use a denticle like texture as it had not been done before but unfortunately I found it impossible to replicate as a texture or a brush to illustrate. The closest I could get was a fish/reptile-like scale texture but this did not work as well as I had hoped. Below are texture samples I created....

Another problem I came across was that many of the textures I created although looked good, gave the mute-suit a metallic feel, this was something I had to avoid as the suit needed to be completely malleable. The texture that I found worked best was one I created by inverting a dimple pattern and then tiling it closely.

Below are studies I did showing the textures on the suits...

Once I had my color scheme, texture and style locked down I began working on the person inside the suit.

Experimentation

With my final basic designs that I liked I began to experiment with them, exaggerating certain parts and allowing myself to be as creative as I could with the core design. I agreed with Yoon (2005) who explains that even when refining ideas that are starting to coalesce it's important keep loose (2005:25).

A selection of the experimental designs are below...

However what I soon discovered was that the more experimental I became with the design, the more outlandish the design became and therefore the more detached from reality the designs.

So I reigned myself back in slightly and kept the functionality and nature of the mute-suit in mind and began to work on color and texture. Acheson (2006), concept designer for the original Spider-man movie explains "The more we messed with the design, the more inevitable it became that we would return to our original idea" (2002:74)

References

As with my environment, now that I had my main concept locked down I began to look at pre-existing bodysuits and body-armour for reference. What I soon found was that all of the existing body-armors were very bulky and would not function the way I needed them to in the game...

What I needed was to be more like a skin-tight bodysuit, the kind of thickness of swimsuits so I began to look at those for reference...

These were definitely much closer to what I was looking for but I had to work a lot on the design as the suit had to look organic yet high-tech.