Finished Vehicle Model

So I finished my model and unwrapped the UVs of each piece and used Photoshop to paint the textures, from these Diffuse maps I made both Specular and Normal maps.

I then applied them to my finished models and left my 3DS Max to render the scene for quite some time

Finished Sci-fi Duo

This post is mainly just so I can finally see my finished duo side by side or at least finished and on the same page so here they are Syriff the cyber upgraded face kicker and his feral companion Chi'ara, who is bound to Syriff through a life debt. I'll go into how I painted her in a later post.

Continuing with my character design Syriff's Face

I have used Jason Momoa as reference for this character mainly his hair and face but Syriff is pretty built too, so here are my sketches and paintings of his face leading to the finished piece.

 I first started with my scanned sketch, it was a4 so not overly big and detailed. After that I practiced painting Jason Momoa's face from reference and for the final one I used some skin and hair brushes in photoshop to apply the features over my original sketch.

In the final version of Syriff I have given him a bit more of a tan and darkened around his eyes to give him a more intense look, which you can see in my next post.

Building my vehicle

To map out the harder parts of my ship I created front, top and side views of the jet/wing/intake piece and applied them to a plane in 3ds Max.

this was a nightmare of a shape to model but I got it done and learnt many different ways that I could have done it better, use of the shell tool being one.

Are Games Art?

To answer this question I will first have to define what art is and what qualifies as art. I will source information to try and achieve a more complete world perspective on art and computer games as art. I will balance the argument with my own views on art and games to attempt to come to a conclusion.

To begin with I will take the literal Wikipedia definition and examine it in detail. The first sentence reads;

 “Art is a diverse range of human activities and the products of those activities, usually involving imaginative or technical skill.” Wikipedia

So without further delving, by this simple definition Computer Games are art but this is not enough, by this definition even a basic child’s finger painting is art. I need to continue and find what separates these forms of art.

Looking at modern triple A game titles it is easy to see that games do contain many forms of art; the music can be atmospheric and evoke emotions which can enhance the story, the architecture and 3D modeling as decorative arts are a small part of these virtual worlds and even the fine art concepts that are created to first envision these models. The way that we interpret these art forms is based off of the viewer’s own perspective which is driven by their personal experiences, including their emotional reactions to these experiences. 

“Art may be characterized in terms of mimesis (its representation of reality), expression, communication of emotion, or other qualities.” Wikipedia

So games are made from a combination of the visual arts (2D & 3D), performance arts (music & film) and are usually backed and given depth by literature.

Containing art does not make games art, instead it is the individuals perception of reality that defines what art is to them. To get a greater understanding of art to the individual I must look to more qualitative sources.

“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”  

Aristotle 

“Art begins when a man, with the purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs”   

Leo Tolstoy

 In these quotes both Aristotle and Tolstoy share the opinion that art is the communication of feelings and meaning, an opinion which is also backed up through Wikipedia’s definition. Therefore using all definitions thus far:

Art is a range of human activities and the product of those activities, involving imaginative and/or technical skill characterized by the expression and communication of emotion through external signs, from the artist(s) to the individual.

Consequently by this definition of art the child’s finger painting could well be art, since the paintings are often a form of affection for their parents. This definition also disqualifies a lot of computer games, even if they do contain works of art there is very little expression or emotion being conveyed in a large portion of games being released. With a lot of companies choosing to ditch the storytelling elements and focus on the multi-player first person shooters, these games cannot qualify as art. To understand how the definition of art has been shaped I must now look to more historic examples. 

In the middle of the 19^th century during the rebuilding of Paris and in the midst of war, the Académie des beaux-Arts ruled over French art. At the Académie they persevered the tradition French painting styles, valuing content of historical subjects, portraits and religious themes whilst still life and landscapes were not. The Académie favored precision, clarity and realism with the colour use being restrained and minimal. Annually the Académie held a juried art show, the salon de Paris, here artists won prizes, received commissions and become more prestigious. The juries held the same values as the Académie and judged the paintings submitted according to those standards.

            In the 1860’s, Claude Monet, Frédréric Bazille, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley met under the tutelage of artist Charles Gleyre. Sharing a passion for contemporary life and painting landscapes rather that the accepted Académie standard of historic and mythical scenes. The four young artist took to venturing out into the country-side together, here they painted onto the canvas directly from nature in the sunlight with bold use of vivid synthetic pigments rather than making sketches to develop later into precise realistic paintings as was the usual custom. They developed a lighter and brighter manner of painting and found themselves joined by artists Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne and Armand Guillaumin for discussions and painting.

In the 1860’s, roughly half of the works submitted by Monet and his friends were rejected by the Salon jury, favoring the artists faithful to the ratified style. In the year 1863, the jury rejected Manet’s “The Luncheon on the Grass”, they did so principally because the painting featured a nude of a woman with two clothed men having a picnic. The Salon regularly accepted nude in historical or mythical scenes but they condemned Manet for his use of a realistic nude in a contemporary setting. The harshly worded rejection of Manet’s work horrified his supporters and the unusually large amount of rejections that year troubled many French artists.

Napoleon III saw the rejected pieces of 1863 and decreed that he would allow the public to judge the work themselves and the Salon of the refused was oraganised. This drew attention to the existence of this new form attracting more visitors than the regular Salon. In the year following artist petitioned for a new Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Refused) but were denied. Then in December 1873, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas and numerous other artists established the Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs ("Cooperative and Anonymous Association of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers"). Here they displayed independent artists’ works who were expected not to participate in the Salon des Paris. Any artists were invited but Édouard Manet declined, in total 30 artist participated, of all the criticisms Monet and Cézanne bore the worst. A critic named Louis Leroy wrote a cutting review of Monet’s Impression, soleil levant. He titled the article Exhibition of the Impressionists, here he stated that Monet’s painting was at most a sketch and could hardly be termed as finished work. His satiric article read;

Impression—I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it ... and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.      

This slice of history to me highlights the fact that even works that consist of art and the pursuit of art can be perceived as insults to the skills of those great masters that are held with such regard. New art is often perceived this way until embraced by the greater masses. Recently the debate of “are games art?” has been surfacing in the media, in 2010 the film critic Roger Ebert embodied the spirit of Louis Leroy for this debate stating

“Games can never be art”.

This was met with an uproar by the general public, being a film critic he judged games by the same standard as Leroy did with Monet’s work.  

Games, as well as movies are some of the best modern mediums for storytelling, all art began as a form of storytelling. For example the Australian aborigines painted symbols from stories on cave walls to help the storyteller remember, from which they would recount the tale using narrative, music, rock art and dance. These four storytelling skills are the ancestors from which all art has evolved and having diverged to become independent forms of storytelling they have re-combined to form theatre then film and now computer games.

Conclusion

In summation games have every right to be considered an Art form but not all games, such as Call of Duty, the player does not pick this game up to feel anything other than excitement at the thrill of competitive button bashing. For a game to be considered art it should focus on one or all of the fundamentals skills of storytelling. From history we have seen how newer generations of artist create new art forms, with the older generations ridiculing the new art. Louis Leroy denounced Monet’s work as art perceiving it as an unfinished sketch and for him it probably remained this way, but the greater masses believed it to be Art and today it is undeniable. This change is already underway in our time, games are being ridiculed by people who haven’t played them and don’t understand them, Roger Ebert a critic of film, who had admittedly never played a game said “Games can never be art” and in return he was flooded with comments from the masses with examples of art encompassing games.

Taking all of this into account, I believe that games are an art form but that right now no game is art, though the movement is already underway.   

Vehicle Concept

I proceeded with my thumbnails in Photoshop to develop them into my final concept.

 I enlarged and worked into one of the thumbnails and added more detail, some of which I carried over into the final concept, two of the main parts being the intake jets and the magnetic net at the rear.

I continued with the idea of a magnetic sphere to catch the floating rocks and did on Wikipedia and found that solenoids creating a strong enough magnetic field could both draw the rocks in and demagnetize them.

I continued on my designs for the legs/arms and decided on a drill piece for the arm.

  Happy with the separate parts I had created I combined them to make my final concept, from which I would base my model

Vehicle thumbnails

To begin my vehicle designs I started with simple thumbnails using various sources of reference as inspiration.

Imagining how the Magnetic Ore Harvester takes off, flying from island to island collecting ores as it moves along, made it clear how similar the concept was to that of a bee or an insects akin to a bee flying from flower to flower collecting pollen. Having realised this I began my thumbnails with that in mind collecting lots of reference of both insects and farming equipment.

Vehicle brief

I was tasked with making a futuristic vehicle that can fly and move on land, I wrote up a quick brief to get a better feel for the vehicle.

Through this brief I gave the vehicle a function so I could figure out its form, I also gave myself a colour palette to work with as it can only be made from non-ferrous materials.

Texture sampling for my main character

Now that I have got most of my characters features where I want them, I am going to use texture samples to further convey the materials that his clothes are made from. I am doing this so that if I were to model and texture this character I would have all the visual information to do it accurately.

To begin with I took the image of the shorts and used the puppet warp tool to make them match the shape of the shorts I painted. With the shorts in the right place and to keep the detail which I had already painted in, I simply selected the eraser tool and turned the opacity of the brush down to 30%. I trimmed the edges to match and erasing along the folds and shaded areas I had painted before hand, this revealed the underlying folds whilst keeping the texture visible also just a little transparent. to intensify the shaded areas I fully erased the texture over it leaving only the shade, colour and form.

I used a similar method with the jacket shown below, but this time I boosted the leather look by using a brush made for skin and enlarging it achieving a bumpy leather texture. I then fitted the jacket with puppet warp and erased where necessary.

 Next I will be repainting his face in greater detail along with his hair and skin.

Photoshop editing my main character

So I began with my scanned version of Syriff which was a bit off in perspective and proportion.

So is started by correcting the arms. I had intended his left arm to be visibly bent, but instead it just came out as short. This was easily fixed by using the puppet warp option to scale in both arms.









I also noticed his legs were a little short so I used the transform tool to lengthen his legs, although I plan to paint more refined legs over these but I just wanted to get them in the right place first.

After using the puppet warp tool again to widen his gait and then began painting in more detailed mechanical legs and some new shorts.































Continuing, I made a new layer and used a layer effect to begin colouring my character.

Now that I have painted in the base colours my next step will be sampling some textures for the leather jacket and his shorts.

Sci-fi Duo continued

I am now in the process of finalising my character profile pictures. I have done my final sketchbook designs for them on a neutral colour of paper so I will be be able to use whites to lift the characters of the page. Below are my final sketchbook designs which I have scanned to edit with photoshop and create the final images.

For my man character I have used images of Jason Momoa as his build and overall appearance is most like what I had envisioned for my main character. As for the sidekick I used a mixture of different reference mostly focusing on here movements because of her dance-fighting which lead me to settle on Gigi Edgley's character in Farscape, Chi'ana as my source of reference.