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 Forum Name: mr kite |
| War General: Chief Beef |
Specialty: General beefiness
tank commander |
| Email: email Andy |
| Website: visit Andy's website |
Media Used: Adobe Photoshop
Discreet 3dsmax
Pixologic Zbrush |
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| Let's start at the beginning, how did you become an artist and as you became an artist, did you ever imagine it would be for games? |
| I'd
always enjoyed inventing characters and computer games so it seemed
inevitable to get into game art at some point. I first started
work as a designer and illustrator in 2000, and amongst the more
general work I was doing I found myself creating a lot of animated
2d sprites for mini-games on interactive cds. After that, 3d wasn't
far behind and I've since been involved with a couple of mod groups.
Last year I had my first experience of making assets for a commercial
game and I'm pretty much hooked on game art now. |
Construction Shots of Chief Beef |
Tell us about the process you undertake to get
the results that you do? How do you come up with
your ideas? Concepts, yes, no? |
| Thinking
about animations, characters from movies and listening to theme
music helps a lot to firm up a character design. I usually make
a composite image from sources outside of games prior to concepting
and I always steal details from real life to speed things up.
For example, Beef's unused fusion pistols had tiny barrel sweeps,
the idea for which was nicked from flintlocks and muskets, albeit
restyled. The mech had lots of functional details snagged from
real tanks (smoke launchers, spade for digging it out in wet weather)
and so on. Quite often I write down ideas on my sketches, they're
usually just excuses that come after the drawing to reinforce
the character, or are just grafted on afterwards to elicit a smile.
Sometimes they feed back into the drawing and fire off another
round of refinements, the process is a bit of a muddle. Mostly
the ideas come from the mystical land of Narnia. I generally don't
improvise in 3d because I find things go much smoother and faster
when the ideas have been worked out in advance in 2d. Plus, if
you're still excited by a concept after scratching it out on paper
then you'll be able to see the model through to the end. |
Tank seen from different angles |
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| During the war, did you ever have any doubts on your design? And were there any compromises or revisions? |
| Yes,
I had lots of false starts and doubts. I wish I'd opted for a
more serious design after seeing some of the cool PC and CGchat
entries, but generally, I'm happy with how he turned out. There
are lots of areas that are weak in the final model and I'll focus
on those when I next come to build a normal mapped critter. I've
yet to come up with a plausible reason for the talking golf club... |
| To get this entry done must have been no easy feat. Tell us about your working habits? Basically, what's your secret to your apparent success? |
| Take
a days holiday when it comes to rendering out the normal maps!
Aside from that - I made a big list of small milestones on a calendar
and whenever I hit a block I took a screengrab and overdrew in
PS to work out the problems. Then I put the workable profile back
into max to speed things up again. When it comes to 2d, I'm fairly
fast anyways, but I tend to force texture progress by flattening
my psd file every hour. Otherwise, it's too easy to fool around
with an un-manageable number of layers, making minute adjustments
no-one would ever notice. Posting small, regular updates for feedback
on a forum is a good way of maintaining momentum. |
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