- Evaluation – Simon Wong -
During the process of the final major project I based my practice on the pre-production stages of videogame design – concept art. As a result, I chose to focus on character, environment and weapon design. This involved experimentation of forms, colour, personality, and theorised functionality. I also strived for effective colour/ tonal balancing in finished renders, as well as utilizing some awkward angles and correct composition.
As a result of working in a team, it was decided early in the project to match drawing styles in order to maintain a sense of unity and flow. The reasons for doing so, is so that myself and Kieran Morris could formulate some basic idea as to how professionals might work and communicate as a team.
Before this project my style would often be loose and somewhat “sketchy”, but I knew that a concept artist would also be required to convey some very clear-cut designs for the 3D modellers to work from. I believe that although I am fairly comfortable with anatomically correct drawing of the human figure, I still need to improve my ability to convey dramatic angles and compositions. All in all, this exercise proved very helpful in expanding the range of styles I am able to convey in my work. In terms of the project, I feel that I can still strive further to clarify my designs more, ensuring that they are both communicative and easy to read.
Using simple thumbnail drawings for the main cast of Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen, I could easily derive the most effective form to work with. These were drawn using a piece of software called “Alchemy”, and it allows for some very expressive results in an incredibly short amount of time. This process helped me define each character more efficiently in addition to setting them apart in terms of defining characteristics/ features. With this process in place, I learnt to speed up my personal working process quite considerably and developed ideas to a more in-depth level compared to past artworks.
Obviously there is still much room for improvement in terms of overall presentation and speed of work produced. Given the time constraints in addition to other deadlines, I wasn’t able to draw orthographic views for each character as I had initially intended. This is problematic because a modeller will need to know how each character or object is comprised from the three main angles (front, back, and side).
Another key area of concern was that I failed to allocate enough time for myself to work on environment concepts. Environments are an area I am far less confident in, and I had originally planned to use this project to develop this weakness to a more acceptable standard. Since character design is an area I had invested much time in the past, it would have made more sense to shift precedence to level design in the earlier stages of this module, before working on the characters themselves.
In hindsight, it is clear that time management is still an area which I need to work, as well as following the defined work schedule as closely as possible in order to minimise disorganization.
- Evaluation – Kieran Morris -
On the final major project I decided to base mine off the game production technique of Conceptual Design. I chose to concentrate on Character, Creature and Landscape design as mine main focuses. My main aims of this project was to produce high quality rendered images of the main Protagonist of the game “Raziel” and to show my experimentation of this design by exploring different design elements using Silhouette thumbnails.
I decided to work in a team for this project so we bounce idea’s and critique each other’s work and process’s as they unfolded throughout the coming months. I worked with Simon Wong as our drawing skills were very similar and we wouldn’t have to hold back on experimentation of design. We also needed to produce a style that was consistent throughout our images. Early on we both decided to split up and cover to separate games in the Legacy of Kain Game series. I would work on Soul Reaver 1 and Simon would work on Blood Omen 1. This would work out to be a pain as Simons game was set 2 millennia before the start of my game. So we had to coordinate between character designs as they had to have similar features but not look the same. However this turned out to cause serious problems early on as it takes 3 times as long for me to produce something that Simon would still be working on. So I made sure to design the protagonist that Simon wasn’t designing so as to start work immediately instead of waiting a week for his design to be finished so I can work of the main features.
To create the silhouette thumbnails I used a program Simon had advised me to use called “Alchemy” which generates random symmetrical shapes of block colour depending on pressure sensitivity on the pen tablet. I used this software to create my thumbnails sketch pages for both “Raziel” and the “Zephonites”.
Another problem that occurred was the time factor which ran out for us early on when it came to doing other design elements like environment and props. In the future allocating more time to separate areas of design would benefit our overall project in the long run.
