High five for even posting this! Yeeeah! A concept artist that cares *tear* 1. Make your orthos line up!!! If you make an ortho of a concept and the details don't line up it actually harms the 3d artist's process more than it helps. It depends on how closely they are expected to match the concept, but if it's precise, and…
Modelers aren't the only victims of unwitting concept artists. Here's some tips that can make Animators lives easier too... 1. Limit flowing cloth to the main character in the game. 2. Tentacles suck to animate, it's typically a perf restriction as well. 3. No long dangling thing between the legs, like this: Link 4. Show…
How to be an awesome concept artist: 1. Learn basic 3d modeling 2. Block out shapes in 3d 3. Paint over 3d shapes to create concept, no "cheating", stick to the actual shapes in 3d. 4. Present modeler with 3d blockout. You can also use the blockout to paintover accurate orthos too, weee! This is mostly for hard surface…
General rule of thumb: 1/ Don't make impossible shapes. Things don't have to line up perfectly in an ortho, but as long as they roughly work, then it's fine. Leave the non-euclidean stuff to the designers. Generally if you can sketch out a few views of different components or sub-sections it'll weed out the impossible…