Platinum games is another fantastic studio to look at. They actually talk about their design process quite a bit on their blog, which is pretty unusual for a Japanese team.
Their stuff has clarity thanks to the line art ; the material definitions are there thanks to the use of efficient shading "codes" coming straight from anime ; and their process is very efficient, because they have no one to impress with flashy paintings, they just work on design. Now of course their work a bit overloaded at times, but it is a conscious stylistic choice.
Also, I can't let slide an opportunity to drop one tiny snarky comment for good measure : If photobashing was such a great design technique, then we would see more than just rag-wearing, assault rifle holding post apocalyptic robots soldiers made with it
I think for cartoon characters like that if they are too be made in 3d it is super helpful, as many super cartoony styles can be interpreted with their forms in so many different ways.
For example, how you made the mustache bulbous, it tells the modeller that that needs to be geometry, whereas without that i would have put it in the texture probably.
So i'd say in this case it's great. Not too sure that i would do it on a realistic style though, doing a shading pass probably works better there.
If you are finding shading slow, maybe check out how Makkon quickly shades with that brush of his. He essentially spends no time blending because of the gradient across the brush.
do you think 3D Modelers can get some use of that ?
Yeah, it definitely helps.
One of the most annoying things I had to model for a client was precisely this type of cartoony character.
Even though concept art included different angles, lots of features were drawn in a symbolic way where each angle suggested a slightly different 3d form (it was most apparent on the face)
The artist most likely had a 2D animation background and didn't really think about possible issues on next stage.
So I ended up drawing wireframe just like you did on your concept. Final topology differed from it but still it was useful for determining what the artist meant.
Of course ! I am referring to the inherent limitations of anime, which forces production studios to adopt very simplified/stylized representations of surface qualities in order to maintain them across hundreds of painted cels. Shadow terminators are sharp, highlights fully omitted on matte surfaces, and so on.
It allows for anime frames to look realistic in an impressionist kind of way, and also scales up perfectly for more tight promotional art.
For instance, look at the way reflections are suggested on the armor ; the way chrome has its own rendering code ; and rubber is just flat grey. And then there are a few more tricks that can be used, like tiny white dots for high specular highlights, and sometime some extra post processing for lighting or exposure effects.
From 1987 :
[arg, the link seems to be crapping itself. Here's a temp re-upload of it for now :]
Stills from the 1998 reboot, which is a full series rather than OAVs - meaning that they have to follow a much faster production cycle.
But it works !
And yeah Dado, such wireframe representations are extremely useful. The irony is that some modelers and art leads don't always realize how helpful these are and rarely ask for them !
The one thing I always like to provide is cross-sections of certain areas - showing how materials are supposed to overlap, or how a part is supposed to be shaped. Just like your very clever wireframes, it helps at taking the "guesswork" out of the increasingly technical modeling process, which should be the overall goal of any tight piece of concept art really
Honestly, it depends. This conversation always pop up at game studios during pre-production, and after much talking the team agrees on one or the other, carefully picking the angle and the default pose, making strict templates and all ... only to realize later that it is not one size fits all.
Front/side/back orthos can be extremely useful for characters, because they allow the modeler to trace the modelsheet with polylines, or even, knife out parts from it to model from. It's really, really fast.
From the concept artist's point of view, one way to produce good orthos is to also work on a loose perspective painting at the same time, allowing to solve form overlaps in space as opposed to only seeing them flattened into an ortho view. This is especially true for armored characters.
Maybe just an idea, Orthos are really only useful in the first 10% of modelling when setting up perspective, and after that the 3/4 view is better at describing the forms.
So maybe if you do your 3/4 views for form and detail, and do quick orthos for production that could be a time saver for the whole team?
Teriaki : yeah, that's pretty much the norm at many studios. However the risk it to get too caught up in such templates, as they can be quite limiting and not everyone will necessary dig the pose, angle and FOV. But yeah, these are useful
I wonder if any useful templates could be made for Character, Environment, Vehicle, Weapon, Prop etc? Not as rules to follow necessarily but sort of a PSD construction kit and to get people thinking of what they want/need to say before passing it off to 3d.
So this is kinda interesting. When we presented objects most of the time we had a lot of leniency to do it however we wished. That being said most of our stuff kind of ended up looking like stuff that previously existed. There is still one catch with this, you're asking concept artist to design for 3D guys.
Imagine you're a concept artist and you are given a briefing on a monday that says something of the effect of "Variations of Viking Warriors with Alien Artifacts, Due Friday 10 AM." Sometimes this is all you have to go on. You're not going to want to use the type of character template you provided because it limits itself to 1 solo character. If it was me I would be trying to cram maybe 5-8 characters on a page and try to do 3-4 pages of characters + design sketch.
This is why most of the photobashed stuff circulates the internet. That design iteration phase is the most important to lock down but once you give the producer what they want who knows what they will do with it. In an ideal system you'll end up getting something like a character animation sheet, which is really close to the template you provided. There are some great character animation sheets out there and I've seen them used a bit in gaming as well.
I could see if you had characters in a jrpg style game doing a sort of character sheet. I've done a few of those myself. For props you get a lot of templated sort of things ie: 25 shields on a page or a row of 10 flags. I honestly dont think you could even begin to do that with environments though. Environmental art (not the isometric style showing a single building) is incredibly involved and is a very difficult combination of design and cinematography. You have to chose the best camera angle to sell the design or sometimes they give you a camera angle in a 3D blockout and you have to design into that camera angle. The great designers will be able to do stuff in every angle but even if you look at stuff like Syd Mead he had a few favorite camera angles (like most cinematographers) that he would use when he was in a jam.
Its why if you look at very amateur environmental painters they will do flat 1 point perspecitve objects in the far distance over either a lot of spiky landscape or a valley.
Where the templates would be most useful I think is on projects not based in a studio that have lots of iterations. You could almost have a classic design bible and as stuff is updated you could just swap pictures out. That would be a fantastic way to work, but real life has a tendency to be much too hectic and messy to constantly update a working bible imo.
Replies
Their stuff has clarity thanks to the line art ; the material definitions are there thanks to the use of efficient shading "codes" coming straight from anime ; and their process is very efficient, because they have no one to impress with flashy paintings, they just work on design. Now of course their work a bit overloaded at times, but it is a conscious stylistic choice.
http://platinumgames.com/2013/01/11/ruminations-on-character-design/
Sorry, I just had to
I think for cartoon characters like that if they are too be made in 3d it is super helpful, as many super cartoony styles can be interpreted with their forms in so many different ways.
For example, how you made the mustache bulbous, it tells the modeller that that needs to be geometry, whereas without that i would have put it in the texture probably.
So i'd say in this case it's great. Not too sure that i would do it on a realistic style though, doing a shading pass probably works better there.
If you are finding shading slow, maybe check out how Makkon quickly shades with that brush of his. He essentially spends no time blending because of the gradient across the brush.
Yeah, it definitely helps.
One of the most annoying things I had to model for a client was precisely this type of cartoony character.
Even though concept art included different angles, lots of features were drawn in a symbolic way where each angle suggested a slightly different 3d form (it was most apparent on the face)
The artist most likely had a 2D animation background and didn't really think about possible issues on next stage.
So I ended up drawing wireframe just like you did on your concept. Final topology differed from it but still it was useful for determining what the artist meant.
It allows for anime frames to look realistic in an impressionist kind of way, and also scales up perfectly for more tight promotional art.
For instance, look at the way reflections are suggested on the armor ; the way chrome has its own rendering code ; and rubber is just flat grey. And then there are a few more tricks that can be used, like tiny white dots for high specular highlights, and sometime some extra post processing for lighting or exposure effects.
From 1987 :
[arg, the link seems to be crapping itself. Here's a temp re-upload of it for now :]
Stills from the 1998 reboot, which is a full series rather than OAVs - meaning that they have to follow a much faster production cycle.
But it works !
And yeah Dado, such wireframe representations are extremely useful. The irony is that some modelers and art leads don't always realize how helpful these are and rarely ask for them !
The one thing I always like to provide is cross-sections of certain areas - showing how materials are supposed to overlap, or how a part is supposed to be shaped. Just like your very clever wireframes, it helps at taking the "guesswork" out of the increasingly technical modeling process, which should be the overall goal of any tight piece of concept art really
Front/side/back orthos can be extremely useful for characters, because they allow the modeler to trace the modelsheet with polylines, or even, knife out parts from it to model from. It's really, really fast.
From the concept artist's point of view, one way to produce good orthos is to also work on a loose perspective painting at the same time, allowing to solve form overlaps in space as opposed to only seeing them flattened into an ortho view. This is especially true for armored characters.
So maybe if you do your 3/4 views for form and detail, and do quick orthos for production that could be a time saver for the whole team?
Sauce https://www.facebook.com/artbymikko?fref=photo
And then of course it needs to be captioned as "just a quick sketch - available on Gumroad !"
So this is kinda interesting. When we presented objects most of the time we had a lot of leniency to do it however we wished. That being said most of our stuff kind of ended up looking like stuff that previously existed. There is still one catch with this, you're asking concept artist to design for 3D guys.
Imagine you're a concept artist and you are given a briefing on a monday that says something of the effect of "Variations of Viking Warriors with Alien Artifacts, Due Friday 10 AM." Sometimes this is all you have to go on. You're not going to want to use the type of character template you provided because it limits itself to 1 solo character. If it was me I would be trying to cram maybe 5-8 characters on a page and try to do 3-4 pages of characters + design sketch.
This is why most of the photobashed stuff circulates the internet. That design iteration phase is the most important to lock down but once you give the producer what they want who knows what they will do with it. In an ideal system you'll end up getting something like a character animation sheet, which is really close to the template you provided. There are some great character animation sheets out there and I've seen them used a bit in gaming as well.
I could see if you had characters in a jrpg style game doing a sort of character sheet. I've done a few of those myself. For props you get a lot of templated sort of things ie: 25 shields on a page or a row of 10 flags. I honestly dont think you could even begin to do that with environments though. Environmental art (not the isometric style showing a single building) is incredibly involved and is a very difficult combination of design and cinematography. You have to chose the best camera angle to sell the design or sometimes they give you a camera angle in a 3D blockout and you have to design into that camera angle. The great designers will be able to do stuff in every angle but even if you look at stuff like Syd Mead he had a few favorite camera angles (like most cinematographers) that he would use when he was in a jam.
Its why if you look at very amateur environmental painters they will do flat 1 point perspecitve objects in the far distance over either a lot of spiky landscape or a valley.
Where the templates would be most useful I think is on projects not based in a studio that have lots of iterations. You could almost have a classic design bible and as stuff is updated you could just swap pictures out. That would be a fantastic way to work, but real life has a tendency to be much too hectic and messy to constantly update a working bible imo.
http://www.creativeuncut.com/gallery-18/art/ttt2-kunimitsu-costume.jpg
Also, that is a nice example though