'The Witness' Art Dump
polycounter lvl 9
For the last 4 years I've been working with Jonathan Blow on 'The Witness' as a senior artist.
The core art team consisted of 3 artists, me (Luis Antonio), Eric Anderson and Orsi Spanyol, and since the game was released on the 26th January, I've been slowly trying to gather all the work I did and find a way to share it with the comunity.
If you have no idea about the game, please take a look at a GDC talk I gave in 2014 about the art direction here:
I was going to write a gigantic post on Polycount, but it's much easier to organize it properly on my website, you see it in more detail here, broke down in several areas:
I have 8 'chapters' released so far and will be showing some more over the next few weeks. (I'll update this post as I do so).
Replies
I have a question about reflection, is it an old school flip geo trick or is it a the real time reflection?
Your use of colour and lighting is absolutely top-notch. I'm in love with the minimalist texturing style. Congrats!
http://www.artofluis.com/2016/02/art-of-the-witness-update-4/
I've also added some new content to the previous sections, due to finding some new images that I forgot we had.
Just curious, did all the statues start as high-poly sculpts? I love the faceted look of them in-game, and would never have suspected that level of detail was ever a part of the workflow.
thanks for the writeups, i found them really informative. the game looks awesome aswell, haven't played it yet but now its on the must play list
The most impressive aspect of the art in the game to me was the composition of everything. At first when playing the game it feels like a great looking game with some cool looking stuff, but as I played the game more and more, literally everything seemed to be placed perfectly for a reason. I imagine this synergy of all the individual pieces must have been very difficult to achieve, but the effort was definitely worth it, because I haven't played a game that's even came close to paying as much attention to the relationship between objects and composition. It's actually changed the way I look at the real world a little bit, which is something I can't really say for the art in any other game. So yeah, what I'm trying to say is: good job!
The process behind composing and arranging the world is not covered too much in the blog posts and it's something I'm really curious about. Was the island arranged first for gameplay then iterated on for visual composition, or was the island designed from the get go with these compositional elements in mind? Were there paintovers or static cameras set up in the editor to get certain elements to line up correctly? Any insight would be appreciated!
Oh, did I mention I really liked the art in this game?
There are two distinct aspects of creating the compositions for the island, and not sure which one you are asking about.
If it's the one related with 'that type of puzzles', the main reason I didn't go into much detail was due to spoilers for people that haven't tried the game yet.
If you mean about doing framing and gameplay guidance to create natural readability and help player navigation, that could be something worth talking about. We had some ways to tackle it as artists, but the collaboration with Architects and Landscape Architects allowed us to discover some interesting workflows to achieve these results. I talk very briefly about it in the Forest & Beach chapter.
Even ignoring the puzzles altogether, there's still a lot that impresses me about the composition. Generally, I'm imagining having architects on the project helped, since they are very used to thinking about how people experience spaces. There's also a lot of little optical illusions that enrich the world that seem like they would have been hard to set up properly. I'm guessing these were conceptualized and implemented solely by the art team?
One of many examples:
Amazing game, masterful art. You're responsible for making me hyper-aware that all of my buildings are wrong wrong WRONG.
The breakdowns so far have been fascinating, thank you for writing them. I'd like to know, how did you find the architects you consulted on the game? Were there specific qualities you looked for? Also, do you have any suggestions for environment artists who want their spaces to feel more grounded, but don't necessarily have the means to hire an expert?
A good example is how in games, medieval towers are often broken down at the corners, where in real life, corners are the most structurally strong part of a tower. (a mistake we often did)
Or when you model stair railings. Most people custom make them and in a industrial style of production, you would fabricate modular pieces. Anything custom is super expensive.
Or even understanding the costs of transportation, like we initially made the brick size in the textures to be pretty big and we were made aware that the bigger bricks are, the harder they are to carry between different places, meaning the labor becomes more expensive etc, etc.
So yeah, being aware of what a reference can provide you besides visual guidance is SUPER important. Also reading about what you are working, and trying to immerse yourself in that topic (e.g. Rain forests, how paths are naturally made, river beds, etc).
Deanna, one of our architects, wrote a great Gamasutra article that speaks about some of these points (love the section about having plants where there is no actual light for them to survive):
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DeannaVanBuren/20151012/254238/Architecture_in_Video_Games_Designing_for_Impact.php
@KID.IN.THE.DARK
Similar to architecture, we focused on understanding the properties of a tree, talking with the Landscape Architects and learn how a tree branch grows, and what are the defining properties. With that in mind, we would model the trunk and foliage to follow these rules and it just ends up feeling natural and correct, giving a lot more room for artistic interpretation without losing realism.
i wonder if consulting architects will be even more common in vr development?