Must see post of ArenaNET art

ChaosEidolon

I dont know if this has been posted, but i think its worth seeing twice even if it has.
Its been a loooong time since ive seen so much orgasmic eye candy in one place. It made me giddy...like a schoolgirl...

Hoooooooleee crap

Tulkamir

Excuse me while I go clean my pants.

ChaosEidolon

my thoughts exactly...

Luxury

garbage.

gauss

the only real disappointment is that the little bit of the in-game art that's represented in that post is a far cry from the style and quality of all the great concept art. consequently i have no desire to play the game since it aesthetic experience is not going to be nearly up to the quality of the concept art... because it is good concept art

aesir

yea, it really is dissapointing that the game doesnt even come close to expressing the epic scale and majesty of the conecpt pieces. Ah well, whatcha gonna do..

Matabus

Was checking these out the other day at work with some co-workers. My penis moved on it's own a 'lil.

Most all of it is amazing shit. There were a couple pieces that were extremely confusing mood-board type collages that I don't see fitting into the Guild Wars universe however.

JKMakowka

Awesome stuff, but wtf is this (take from the link above):
http://www.tangrala.com/artwork/ch2_tiger.jpg
???

Ferg

some sort of tiger I'd guess, though I'm no scientist

edit: that thread is a fountain of inspiration... all images downloaded + added to big love inspirado folder

Thegodzero

drools....

ebagg

They got some insane concept artists over there at ArenaNet! That stuff is definitely some of the most top notch concepts of any game ever.

Spacey

My rightclicksaveas broke off halfway through...

Tulkamir

Gauss, I don't think there has even been a game that lives up to the quality of that kind of art. The in game guild wars art isn't as good as that style, no, but the game is still beautiful.

poopinmymouth

Definitely awesome concepts, but it's such a poor use of developer dollars. When people pay for Guildwars, they are paying for the game. The in game assets should have the highest priority in terms of dollars spent. They either need to shell out more money for 3d artists as good as their concept artists, or they should cut back on money spent in the concept department, and spread it over to the 3d department. None of the assets in game come close to their conceptual counterparts, and that's the part that people paying for the product see.

Just realized this post comes off as a bit negative, no offense meant towards the 3d artists at the studio, it's definately great work, and the game is nice looking. I just think it's pointless to put so much effort into pre production for a product and not actually put an equal effort into the product itself.

Ferg

"the best you can is good enough"

They've had job postings on their site for character and enviro artists for as long as I can remember (though it seems now they're only looking for creature artists), so it's not like they haven't been trying [to hire as many awesome people as they can]. Pretty much all the "best" games out there have a similar relationship between the concept art and the 3d art, poop. Halo, WoW, guild wars, black and white, unreal tournament, the oddworld games, etc. They've all got outstanding in game art, but the concept art pretty much always oozes more badassery and coolness than the final in game stuff. Mostly has to do with technical and time limitations I'd imagine, rather than a lack of effort/skill.

McIlroy

Not all of it but some of that conceopt art is among th best concept art ive ever seen ...outstanding stuff !
Hey poop I totally disagree with you BTW from the stuff that is posetd that is 3D is looks nicely modeled and textured for pretty low poly assets at least from that Coondoggle person. I think he/she are doing a very good job for the limitations that they have . Much nicer work then a lot of companies ive seen working with the same area of limitations .

The only thing is that some of the 3D models are good models but have bad textures . It's wierd ,if that Coondoggle person textured all the models they would all be very excellent quality but it looks like each modeler textures there own assets .

oXYnary

Arenanet is one of the best places to work around here (and one of the most difficult to get into). Aaron, one of the art leads runs the Art not Terminal figure drawing sessions on Saturday morning. Not only this, but there are more than a few Arena net artists who attend these. You should see his fine art oil paintings.

As fas as the difference between concepts and finale. Could it also be they are working with lower spec system hardware? Though I did ask Aaron once about the modeling portion, and from what little information he was able to give, it sounds like the departments are somewhat segragated.. Again, from how I understood. I did get a feeling though there was a distance between each art step as he off handedly mentioned items being sent to modelers without first hand experience.

gauss

tulk: HL2 and Episode 1 look as good or, in many places, better than the original concept art. Metroid Prime did a very good job of keeping the spirit and style of Andrew Jones' phenomenal work on that game's visual design intact. Granted, the production art was done by the same person in many instances, but Doom 3's characters looked as good or better than Ken Scott's concepts as well.
i'm more or less with poop on this one, there's just too much of a disconnect between the concept art and the finished product. the concept art is great for a collector's edition artbook or something maybe, but it's hard not to think there's quite a bit of waste having that many highly trained concept artists and not having a matching or greater cadre of 3d modelers.

hawken

this is why games cost millions to develop.

sexy way to spend money though

Daz

gauss and poop: I can in part but perhaps not wholly agree. I think the fact that were talking about an mmo rpg here is really being understated. Now that I'm working on one, I've a new found respect for their numerous obvious and *not* so obvious technical limitations so I'm really not at all surprised at the disconnect. It's a gazillion times easier to make a good looking enclosed HL2 map than a landscape feature that's fully integrated into a vast streaming 'go anywhere' world.

The in game models shown here, though not bad by any means, are certainly pretty 'old skool' in their use of resources. Of course you're gonna have a disconnect between a stunning 2D painting and a 1500 tri model with a not huge texture and no per pixel shaders.

That said, more so on the environment side, I have to admit that I didn't play Factions, but looking at screenshots, I don't see anything *remotely* as grandiose or epic feeling there as in some of that awesome concept Art. Which does seem inefficient If you consider that a lot of that stunning environmental concept work was seemingly good for not much more than collecters edition artbook as you say, gauss. If the Art they were churning out was so technically inplausible in game, then it seems like that was badly handled. So I see what you're saying there poop about poorly allocated budget. It's good that you're thinking about that stuff

Tulkamir

I suppose that you are right Gauss, although with the same reservations as Daz put.

But yea, in truth, I bought the Guild Wars Collectors edition. I don't play the game any more, but I do look at the art book regularly.

steady

anyone happen to save all of this and put it into a zip/rar and put it on rapidshare.de? :P

FunkaDelicDass

I'm an avid Factions player and I think the in-game stuff looks fantastic, for the specs it was created for. Sure it doesn't have normal mapping, but load times are extremely fast; a performance tradeoff I really like. The environment assets may show some weakness when looked at individually, but as a whole, I think they really shine. The Jade Sea environemts are incredible, although I will admit that the slum/city areas don't hold up to the vitality of their concepts. I also think the character models and textures, especially for the higher end armor sets, are very well done.

Since they supposedly have two teams working on a staggered timeline, I'm guessing they have a single team of concept guys who crank out stuff for one of the games, then they jump to the next game which is probably just starting to take shape. Keeping concept guys busy year-long is probably an issue they don't have.

Jes

See, this is why I LOVE GuildWars' loading screens.

The top-notch concept art that appears in many of the different regions' loading screens continues to amaze me - not that the game isn't pretty in it's own right, but it just doesn't compare to the drawings the guys at ArenaNET did. And besides, it's an MMO. It's not geared towards being always pretty, but towards being always playable.

BoBo_the_seal

I think their art kicks ass! I really like a lot of the in-game work. I look at all the intricate work that goes into the character art and cringe at the tediousness involved.
Look at all the little details in the concept and the final in-game asset:
http://www.aaroncoberly.com/Factions/F_Ritualist_03.jpg
http://www.guildwars.com/images/screenshots/gwscreen087-lrg.jpg

I agree that the conceptual work really stands out. The nice thing about the high standard of their conceptual art is that I have 2 art of books sitting right next to me which made getting the collectors additions of the game that much more appealing. Great conceptual work also goes a long way within the marketing of a product.

- BoBo

firestarter

There`s some seriously beautiful concept art there, particularly the environment work, rocked my socks.

nitzmoff

I really can't disagree with a lot of you more. Their concept art is beautiful and given their specs and as Daz pointed out, their needing to make 'go anywhere' environments, I always thought they did a magnificent job of matching concept to completion.

Many of the grandiose concept pieces are generally matched in as large of a scope as the game can handle and are usually spot on when it comes to use of texture and light. there are many shots from the Prophecies art book that are almost perfectly represented from a certain angle somewhere in the game.

It's half the reason I keep playing.

Kevin Albers

Those concepts kick ass. If they would put together an "art of Guild Wars" book that covers the main game and the various expansions, I would buy it in a heartbeat. It does seem sort of self-indulgent to develop so many detailed concept paintings, but I don't exactly fault the developers. I like building assets that have very inspiring concept art. Also, great concepts like these work nicely as marketing materials, and help sell more copies of the game. I bought Guild Wars precisely because I saw all the great concepts for it. I wish they could re-use the concepts in a few years, and remake a lot of models using pixel shaders, more polys, etc.

KDR_11k

Some of those environ pieces look more like post-apocalyptic future or mechanical deathstar than fantasy to me. But maybe I'm misinterpreting wood as corrugated metal.

TomDunne

To follow what Poop and Gauss said, I'm not 100% sure I understand. As far as I can tell, the only truly 'wasted' resource for this kind of work would be money, right? The concept artists wouldn't be developing in-game assets, so I would think it's not a loss of time or manpower, just some slice of the dev budget?

I work a healthy distance away from the game industry (mostly in advertising these days) and my experience in general is that the companies that dedicate serious resources to concept and pre-visualization get better results. What I don't know if that's because a great conceptual foundation naturally improves the final result or because companies that take the concept phase seriously also are the ones who apply their best efforts to other phases of development as well. I haven't seen the Guild Wars game content - do I understand correctly that it doesn't live up to the quality of the pre-production work?

Toomas

It does live up to the concepts and it runs great on crap hardware.

Dravalen

[ QUOTE ]
To follow what Poop and Gauss said, I'm not 100% sure I understand. As far as I can tell, the only truly 'wasted' resource for this kind of work would be money, right? The concept artists wouldn't be developing in-game assets, so I would think it's not a loss of time or manpower, just some slice of the dev budget?

[/ QUOTE ]

I can't speak for Arena but our two main concept guys here both model in addition to creating concept work.

Darksun

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yea, it really is dissapointing that the game doesnt even come close to expressing the epic scale and majesty of the conecpt pieces. Ah well, whatcha gonna do..

[/ QUOTE ]

Huh?

Zcubed

I've never played the game, but that concept art is mindblowing! Truly inspirational (Saved it all ).

cochtl

i'd rather have a few people making many different designs and iterations of concept art than have a whole art team try and figure out what to do exactly. it's great stuff btw