For today's lesson at Futureworks we had a guest lecture from a guy called Shaun Mooney who is a professional concept artist working within the games industry who's worked for TT and Atomhawk in the past. He was brought in to talk to us about himself, what he’s done since he finished university on his games design course at Preston and what he’s done to make a professional career; he also went through his work process which I will talk about after. Firstly he talked about himself then he began to show his work, he sectioned his work up into 3 categories design, illustrations and mood's he talked about each of these areas in depth such as design is purely the process of designing something weather that might be a character, weapon or a environment, something that’s done fairly quick to a presentable state which shows different design variations and ideas. Illustrations are something where the design has already been finalised and its just to make a nice image to show textures and the form of the concept so this can be passed on to a 3d artist to make your concept ready for the game engine. Finally is mood, where quick ideas and concepts are made to get a 'mood' across for an environment or area of a game, this could be colour or black and white as long as they get the mood across that you intended.
Next Shaun went through a tutorial and shown his process of creating concepts to final rendered designs with his usual workflow which he applies to most areas of concept art. For this tutorial he shown us how he designs weapons, the first step is throwing out several black thumbnail silhouettes which are done quickly with a hard brush adding and erasing parts until he is happy with the design, below are a few weapon thumbnails i drawn up myself which I may further develop in my free time.
The next step was to then choose a design that is preferred
to work up to final concept, below is an image of his basic process after the
thumbnail selection, what is great with this way of working is that it is so
fast you could knock out a few of these in a day which the art lead could take
a look at and even approve the concept to final or 3d. Mooney also shown us tons of
shortcuts and tricks in Photoshop which we could use to improve our work flow and
speed which was a big bonus and definitely helped to get the idea across that
speed is key in games industry, which is what he drilled into us in the
lecture, speed is everything to get ideas across quickly and efficiently, he
even recommended the use of photographs in concepts, kind of like a matte
painting using these images to aid you in your designs, to paint over them and get
the idea across quickly which was the best and most valuable lesson of the day.
It was a great lecture and i learnt a ton! Shaun Mooney is a great artist, what
he’s doing know is where i aspire to be, to get a career in the games industry, hopefully one day the time and effort i put into my work will pay of.
Here a link to Shaun’s portfolio for more of his work:
http://smooneyconceptart.blogspot.co.uk/
(Image by Shaun Mooney)
Painting Progress
And here is a little progress on the final painting, I’ve fleshed a few things out a bit more on my break at uni so not had much time but thought id post it anyway, I’ve also chopped the dragons head out of my previous illustration and re-jigged it and opened it mouth to get an idea of how it’s going to look, the rest of the scene needs to be done then and add some colour.
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