Reimagining Your Designs?
polycounter lvl 7
Hey everyone, I was wondering; Does anyone have any helpful tips for when you are stuck in a creative rut trying to come up with something new and interesting?
I'm trying to make a robot but every time I just feel completely poisoned by existing designs, everything I come up with just looks and feels bland and derivative. Whenever I do change something, it just feels like I am changing it for the sake of changing it, and that it no longer fits with the rest of the design scheme, like as if someone tacked bones images on Superman's outfit, it would just be wrong and everyone would know it.
Anyways, any help would be great, I'm feeling incredibly uninspired and looking at other concepts is just doing the opposite for me and making me feel even less creative.
I'm trying to make a robot but every time I just feel completely poisoned by existing designs, everything I come up with just looks and feels bland and derivative. Whenever I do change something, it just feels like I am changing it for the sake of changing it, and that it no longer fits with the rest of the design scheme, like as if someone tacked bones images on Superman's outfit, it would just be wrong and everyone would know it.
Anyways, any help would be great, I'm feeling incredibly uninspired and looking at other concepts is just doing the opposite for me and making me feel even less creative.
Replies
I find these two links help a lot, you may or may not have seen them but definitely worth a read when your creativity needs a kick in backside.
Paul Richards Thumb War
MoP's Idea Generator
I don't drink.
I liked the first link, there was a lot of interesting stuff in there, the second one was a bit hap-hazard but useful I wasn't trying to go for something specific. Thanks!
I always tend to shy away from ideas I don't feel comfortable with if I 'say no' to certain ideas, whereas being strict and literally just drawing the first suggestion that comes up could be helpful.
But that's just me. Now and then it does throw up something which just begs to be drawn/painted/modelled/sculpted!
A charming green clown parties with a fierce metal policeman at sunset!
My 'concepting' aka. Doodling the same thing over and over trying to get it right. I stopped trying to model it straight and started drawing after I realized that modeling it from my head was too hard/a bad idea.
Eye spy with my little eye, a Chocobo with Cloud's hair!
And @Dado, it is an alien robot that apparently is semi organic according to my scribbles. Props if anyone recognizes where it is inspired from.
FOCUS ON BIG SHAPES
You might think you have an awesome thought process for building something starting with little details that add up to some big idea, and that does work, for other creative endeavors like writing, but with visual art size is everything.
What you are making when you make a concept isn't a 3D object, your making a projection of a 3D object on a piece of paper; meaning you wont be getting closer or farther away from it. It will have a fixed size.
Even in 3D we never see the entire form all at once we only see cross sections of it in space. We see the world as a projection, in 2D, never in 3D.
What we call 3D forms are really just our brain sampling a whole bunch of 2D projections and then organizing them to give us a sense of something in 3D space.
So when you go to imagine your concept on paper start off with a big blob and then make one side flatter and one side rounder, start making some parts convex and other parts concave. At some point your brain will associate what its seeing with one of the countless 2D projections it has stored in memory.
Once you have that aha! moment, then you can push further, but NOT BEFORE.
If you do it before hand your going to be fighting the very way your brain sees and stores visual data, which is, 2D cross sections of large forms.
Adding details is way easier once you have a mental projection to hang them all on.
Anyways, don't know if that helps. Its really just a more in depth way of saying "focus on silhouette", but I don't think a lot of people understand why that advice is given, that's my take on it.
so you shouldn't be to hard to yourself.
imo its more about seeing potential then doing-it-right-in-the-first-try
scribbling is more about letting your hand draw and your brain decide
Every time I try to draw with my brain in the doodling phase it leads to nothing
thats what thumbs are all for.
and with time your hand knows more and more what your brain wants to see
man does this sounds nerdy? I hope so
Find your motivation
You wanna blow somebody with your skills?
You need a killer piece for your portfolio?
You can do a better interpretation of someone's design?
You test new tools or technique?
You feed off inspiration from art/animation you've seen
Whatever it is, it's easier to create if you have motivation. Doing art for forum art contests is one of my artmaking motivations. No question, you'd do a lot of art if offered $$$.
Hard to make art just to make art and not really trying to prove anything, so find your "muse" brother. :thumbup:
(as long as you're not just copying
It's a good idea to be always trying to expand your sphere of interest. So that you're exposing yourself to new ideas, new looks, all the time. Don't just look at game art but all visual areas. This way you'll always be inspired and full of new ideas.
I really appreciate this information. I haven't had an idea in a long time, so I finally used my school time usefully and now I have a concept to work on!
thats one of the best art book i ve ever bought
@jocose: By big shapes do you mean like the few solid black outline/shape things I did that don't have any detail in them? I've seen other artists concept by doing black outlines of the silhouette but it didn't really work all that well for me because I am so locked in in my mind that all the sillhouettes came out exactly the same.
@Dado: I started by doing that in 3D but I very quickly established I couldn't keep the form fluid and do quick concepts in 3D the way I wanted to, so I started doing it in photoshop instead.
@rollin: I'm not sure I follow you here. I should see the model in my head and then draw it from that, not doodle till I get something that feels right?
and @xvampire: Your link is blocked for Nudity at my college but I'll look at it once I get home.
Everyone else, good advice about motiviation, I appreciate it. Right now I'm trying to focus on the technical aspects of good concepting and design, looking at/how to do grey scale flats and stuff.
quite obviously where your going wrong...
really though this-
They're a bit big because I tend to work big, probably could have scaled them down in retrospect.
Is this the sort of thing everyone meant? Doing this has helped me get a firmer grasp on what/where I am going at the least.
EDIT: I tried a 3D blockout now that I have a better idea of the shapes involved. I'm not really satisfied with it but it better then the earlier attempts.
Dont mean to hijack your thread
What I do instead is pretend I'm actually trying to solve a real-world engineering problem and turn my brain loose on that. Let's say I needed to come up with a unique look for a robot. I would try to give the robot a purpose and go from there. I'll go with a rescue/firefighting robot:
-I know I need an artificial humanoid figure, since it needs to interact with humans and in human structures. This means no wheels for feet, it can't be 12 feet tall, etc. A basic figure seems appropriate.
-Because it's going to be in fires, I want lots of synthetic materials that don't burn or get too hot. No exposed meta, of course, but maybe some high-impact plastics and foam or even some kind of fire-proof fabrics (that's definitely interesting.)
-I also need an arsenal of equipment, like a fire ax, hydraulic cutters/jaws of life, oxygen/breathing gear for rescue victims, and maybe some water hose attachments in the chest with a shoulder spray mount (water turret!) I want to keep the arms free for carrying people, though, so I think about attaching these elements to the back or through the torso. They could be operated as heavy duty versions of normal tools that the robot uses by hand - accessories are always fun.
-Since it's carrying a lot of gear and needs to be durable, it's also bulky/strong. Maybe a form like a Gears of War soldier, in terms of heft. But it's also built to help people, so I want the forms rounded and approachable, with an anthropomorphic face that inspires friendliness (no one wants the Terminator skull greeting them atop the rescue bot!)
-Finally, I think color schemes. It's primarily red or white, so it reminds you of an emergency/resuce vehicle, but maybe with some striped black/yellow warning labels, since it's also a piece of heavy industrial gear.
Having just done this off the top of my head, I've got a couple things there I know I wouldn't have come up with if I was just doodling for unique visuals. The fabric idea seems very distinctive for a robot - I could line parts of the body with canvas like on a firefighter's coat, maybe as detachable armor pieces. Very fun visual, and definitely a unique look. Also, treating the body like a giant fireplug stands out, with those big valves for hoses bulging a bit from the trunk, and a classic spray nozzle attaching higher up on the body.
Sorry for the long post, but that was kind of fun to go through! I've done my thinking about an engineering problem rather than a visual aesthetic, so I'm not getting hung up on other cool robot designs and now I have a pretty good mental image of what I want to make. Another really cool thing about this method is that I already have a back story sort of built in for my idea, and it can lead to other ideas as well as help me avoid adding extraneous junk that doesn't fit the concept.
@Sayaonara: I get what you mean but I am close to the point where I am past the part of blocking it out I just get stuck looking at it at the microscopic scale trying to work every tiny little detail in except none of it is working because I don't have a solid concept to work from.
@TomDunne: Don't be sorry for a long post, more info is better then no info. I understand what you mean by going for functional realism instead of cool design, but that seems even harder for me since this robot looks and acts nothing like real life, I have even less of a point of reference to work from in that case, even if I try to pretend like 'Oh such and such coating is good to protect from plasma and thousand degree temperatures.'
I'm just getting incredibly frustrated with this model and its only like two days into it and feeling incredibly pressured because it has to be absolutely done in three weeks. Its making me feel like I'm not an artist at all, just some mime that can only copy other people's concept art because everything I try to come up with looks like horrible crap that looks like a first year did it when in my head I have this unattainable ideal of half decentness, let alone passable or perfection.
I know its not all fun and games all the time I just hate pieces that make me stop loving my work and wanting nothing to do with it. Frustration level critical. Whats worse is that I -can't- just take a step back from it and work on something else or something while I get inspired, I absolutely have to have this done deadline in three weeks.
I'm getting way too overwhelmed and off track here. The piece of the elephant I need to chew right now is having a finished lineart with greyscale flats to model from, but that's not working at all either.
At this point I am contemplating starting a new thread in the Previews section rather then general discussion. Anyways, tried it again, what am I doing wrong this time?
On the right is a collage of other mechanical parts cut and pasted to inspire myself from but in the end I barely looked at them at all. The calf looks like a bloated gas bag then a muscle and I accidentally added a heel when I never intended one. I think I went too far on the Giger scale compared to traditional machine here, going to try something new next time.
Top left is the basic shape of the leg I want in mesh and a dog's leg bone structure next to it to compare to reality.
Anatomical/Muscular/Whatever Sctructure of the leg? This sorta helps but it is also restrictive in a way, not sure how to make the calf huge.