the importance of playing with your work

Usually when im doing a 3d project on max i find my self doing the work and adding the maps that i want the piece to have and then if im satisfied i would usually leave it, though if i do notice problems i will try to resolve them to finish the piece off.

However recently i have been purchasing different books which shows me some of the great 3d artists out there at the moment. Like one book i have called digital art masters covers a wide range of digital artist, so isnt necessarily just confined to game art. but even so when looking at some of the work produced it just inspires you in your own work. i would start looking at a certain artist in this book and they would then give a brief description of how the produced a piece of their work.

in the case of pieces of work that is produced in max the artist may inform you on some of the effects they have used that you wouldn't necessarily have thought of, so then this leads you to start playing around with your own work even if its just testing things to see if it would work. tats what ive started to notice more about how ive been approaching my work. i know that I should never be satisfied with my work and that its best to always think of ways to imporove the piece.

i have found this attitude to be really helpful though as even with tampering with things that your testing, you can find things by accident. Like for instance i finished producing a treasure chest and even though i had added all the maps that i wanted and i was quite satisfied i still proceeded to test different effects on it and it was through this method that i discover how to create an ambient map over a bump map. It wasn't like i found some tutorial on the internet or some thing that i read about in a book, but was something i learnt simply from playing with the piece of work to see what worked. It just goes to show how even when yout think you have a piece of work that is finished, that you can improve on it if you have the tiime to play with it.

film and games

I know i haven't really been blogging that much recently, but i would like to think that the start of a new term will mean that i can get back on track with this blogging business, at least for the next few days anyway as i have had topics which i wanted to blog about, but just didnt due to me tinkering with pieces of work im unsatisfied with and me not being much of a writer.

Anyway i wanted to start writing about some thoughts that have been recently goin through my mind that i wanted to share with you all. Some of the major influences when producing ideas or designs for me have been through films, i get to see alot of films free anyway which is a big bonus when working in a cinema. But its always good to see that games can also influence films as i noticed in a film i watched a few weeks ago. The film that i'm writing about here is district 9, now this film i believe was always going to be closely influenced by games as the director was originally suppose to start work on the halo movie before distrubution rights made the entire project collapse and the director then moved on to make this movie.

When district 9 starts it all seems like a film and a quite different one at that as i found the racist remarks against the aliens referring to them as 'prawns' was an interesting touch along with the general behaviour towards the alien inhabitants. Then halfway through the film the main protagonist manages to accidently aquire an alien arm. Now to me this is something ive never seen in a film unless you want to include the original fly film, but in that case the character was left with the disadvantage of having their new body part. in District 9 however the character with the alien arm had the advantage of using alien technology and to become an almost unstoppable force in the film. This is where i think designers had the most amount of fun designing the weapons. It was at this point that i started to realise that most of the weapons were as though they had been taken straight from games. For instance there was a mech suit that had a gravity gun, that would fling pigs with powerful force at enemys that seem to have been taken from half life and tesla guns like in wolfenstein, though the gun in the film didnt just shock but would result in the victims guts exploding across the walls!

When i had finished watching it was then that i realised that this film easily could have been a game instead of a movie and now since this thought passed through my mind ive been making these comparisons with other films. like a few days ago i watched irobot, then whilst watching it i remembered how Will Smith actually has a bionic arm. this then immediately started me thinking about games like bionic commando or prototype. Even thinkin off the top of my head i know there are scenes in G.I. Joe where characters get to wear suits that make you run as fast as a car and let u jump over a train, which sounds more like a game scenario to me.

I guess my point to all this is that the line between games and film are thinner than i once thought. i knew that games and film were becoming more alike, we all know that some games have started to use actors as characters in game. but i just didn't realise how much similar they are these days. This then gets me started thinking about how nothing really seems that original anymore. it just seems to me that things are just taken from other peoples ideas and they are changed a little bit then they claim that the idea is original. Like i can understand where people like Peter Jackson are coming from who say that films like district 9 are original, but at the same time i dont agree with this statement as like i mentioned this film has taken ideas from games like half life and claim that its an original piece of work.

Assistance of concept artists

When i started on the concept of this piece, i started without using any form of reference material which was probably not the best of ideas. However i pushed on with this concept which was the idea of having this mini hideout amidst the mountains in an alien environment.

When looking at this piece of work i could see that there were problems but sometimes it is quite hard in determining exactly what the problem in the image is. I then found this problem to be even more harder as i hadn't actually used any reference.

At this stage i was really struggling to complete the image, so i therefore started looking at other artists to see how i could improve my work. An artists that is really influencing me at the moment is Gary Tonge who can create some fantastic landscape pieces of work. I quickly realised by looking at his work that my own was missing alot of shadow. I therefore incorporated the shadows into my work and actually started adding more details to areas like the sky which i felt was a little bland before.

I feel like the resulting piece of work is a vast improvement in comparison to my earlier image, which is all thanks from the aid of the masters in the industry!

Trouble with perspective? use max!

I just thought i would post this message out there for reference for the other game artists that are out there, that might be struggling with perspective, especially when it comes to more complex structures.

When i was producing designs for the land, sea and air yacht project, i managed to produce a side image that i really liked, however i found that i was struggling with the perspective on the design and when putting pencil to paper i found that i wasn't progressing any further in getting the design into perspective. i therefore decided that i should create a model of my design to achieve the correct perspective.

However i felt that actually trying to create something out of clay or paper would be to much time consuming, that when i remembered reading about the concept artist Gary Tonge and how he would use software like 3dmax to create complex designs which he found hard to put into perspective. i therefore went through this process and found that it really help me to finalise my design. It just goes to show that from time to time we all can struggle with perspective even the professional, but its good to know that 3d max can be not just for game production but can assist in visual design as well

The resident evil issue

Resident evil series has now reached its 5th edition and is due for release in March. But an interesting issue about this game at the moment isn't anything to do with gameplay, but the politically incorrect points that has been raised by a few critics, that the game is racist. Now just because the game is set in africa and that the protagonist in the game happens to be white does not necessarily mean that the game is racist.

I have managed to play the demo of the game and you do play as the protagonist Chris Redfield having to kill mainly black zombies, however in the demo there are still a variety of different race of zombies to kill. An example of what one critic wrote was that black people in the game were depicted as inhuman savages and that the protagonist was attacking these zombies in military clothing, which implies to me that this critic believes that the whole idea of the game is the slaughter and genocide of an ethnic group.

The funny thing is that issues like this wasn't raised during the production of the 4th Resident evil game when an american is roaming around Europe killing Spanish zombies. If roaming around africa killing zombies is racist then isn't killing spanish zombies just as racist?

Issues have even been raised about Sheva who assists the protagonist through out the game, as even though she is of black origin, the character has been criticised for having a lighter skin tone by another critic.

Its a shame that this has all become a big issue and i hope that the end product of the game is designed exactly how the developers want it to be. Because at the end of the day i wouldn't want the developers to change or cut parts of the game and make the game not as good as it was originally intended. As this game is intended for entertainment purposes so in reality all the designers should worry about is to make the game as most entertaining and realistic as possible.

Critic's links:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/resident-evil-5-hands-on-chapter1to3?page=3

http://www.blacklooks.org/2007/07/resident_evil_5.html