IndieLib competition
IndieLib – my favourite 2D engine is running a competition in November (1st to 30th)
IndieLib is also now LGPL (open source)
Add comment October 30th, 2008
Archive for October, 2008
The Language of our Times
Nick Pugh in “Originality in Design” talks about creating an unique visual language, an iconography for your work. We copy and borrow from modern pop culture all the time, so it’s often difficult to create something truly “original” or “unique” – especially within a known genre.
Nick himself, fights with creating original car designs – an area with very specific constraints.
How he approaches it is to free draw “garbage” for an hour or so. Writers will perform a similar task by free-writing for a dozen or so pages before attempting something specific. It loosens up the mind to be creative and effectively kills the inner critic.
There is a theory that creating anything original is impossible, because all the ideas have been thought of. Originality is not the goal in my opinion.
It’s all about creating an “iconography” which, to me, means something distinctive enough that others will copy it in the future.
Often you’ll see the borrowing of iconography in advertising because they need to make an impact quickest – thus must “borrow” their style.
Warhol has been cloned in ads (and he borrowed plenty himself).
(Pepe Jeans)
(Levi Jeans)
Back in the mid-90s, his b&w montage photos were also borrowed by Guess Jeans and were the first things you saw when you opened a copy of Rolling Stones (the magazine).
A cliche had to originate from somewhere (mostly that William guy!)… it wasn’t a cliche to start with, but became one from overuse.
Modern/recent iconography:
Geometry Wars. It modernized the neon-geometric iconography of the early 80s.
Apple ads (many of these have become iconic):
Toy Story – Introduced the mainstream to plastic computer graphics rendering.
The Matrix – Bullet time and green symbol art.
The Matrix borrowed plenty of iconography itself: leather-bound fetish wear, Snowcrash and other cyberpunk novels…. but yet it was considered somewhat original. All because of bullet time + techno-art and how that film integrated those elements.
Without a distinctive language, your game / novel / piece of art will get lost in the noise. The iconography acts as your best ad.
Add comment October 4th, 2008
Lost in Translation
It’s been a tough month – I’ve been ill or away at weddings or random conferences. At least I’ve been awarded a Telefilm extension on the project!
Anyhow, I’ve had to let go some junior/intermediate artists unfortunately. There’s a well known axiom called “Cheap, Fast or Good – pick two” and I’ve encountered it.
I assumed most intermediate artists were pretty similar – given a detailed design (i.e concept art / model sheet) I could pick any 3D modeler and have a good final result. With programmers, I do not think this way. I prefer the most senior programmer over a dozen junior programmers, but with managing artists, I’m new to i. Well, junior/intermediate 3D modelers are typically cheap and try to be fast, but the end result is not very good.
The problem is of translation – between design and 3D model. I’ll provide an example from “The Art of Game Characters” book. It has pages upon pages of concept art (and sometimes their final result in game).
Original:
Final result:
This is a pretty extreme example as the woman looks nothing like the design and the general is not even fat! The original designs exudes personality and had a distinctive style, but the final models are dull and generic. The modeler (or modeling supervisor) decided to go in a different direction or did not have the skill to execute the original design (which is quite challenging). I suspect the concepts were deemed too difficult and beyond the skill of the modelers so it was dumb down to traditional human proportions.
For The Supers, I performed a test – I gave 5 modelers – from junior to senior – the same building design and told them to try to match it but they were free to add to it if they feel it makes the model better.
The result: 5 completely different models were returned – varying polygon counts, varying artistic consistency, closeness to design, etc. Being a non-artist, this really surprised me! The original (2D) design was pretty well-defined to me, but each modeler took a slightly different direction… and best models were by senior artists who have that “artistic sense” lacking in the the ones by juniors. How did I define best? Lowest poly count (technical), pleases everybody who sees it (artistic), cleanest geometry (technical), matches the original design (artistic). With the non-best models, I and many others would say “there is something wrong” but be unable to pinpoint it.
So I let go all junior/intermediate artists and kept only the senior ones on-board. The past few months, I had major problems with the junior/intermediate artists failing to match the designs which I originally attributed to poor communication between the art director and them, but my tests proved me wrong. The junior/intermediate artists also botched rigging and other 3D tasks rather badly so I began to clue in earlier, but blamed other factors (again, poor communication).
Seniors are more expensive, but at least their work doesn’t need to be re-done! So I’ve chosen Fast and Good over Cheap.
1 comment October 2nd, 2008