The Design Process for the Art Team

[SavisArmador]

[SavisArmador]

Game Design: Games have a complex design process, which usually all starts from one idea. The idea is developed through a process generally similar to the example provided here, which shows the progression from idea to finished title, from the artistic side of the team. Programmers often have little input on this area, and instead tend towards just building what the creative parts of the team think up.

Initial Concept: Game studios often produce many concepts that never see the light of day. Often, many members of the team will all create their own game concepts, and the team will decide on the best concepts, and which of those they should make into a full game. Artists Elaborate on Concept: Once the concept is chosen, the concept artists will bring up many potential ideas and designs for the game, such as characters, environments, and the overall visual style of the game. All of these will be made keeping the story and lore of the game in mind. Story & Lore: While the Story & Lore are generally produced by people other than the visual artists, they play a critical role in defining the appearance of the world, characters, equipment, clothing, armor, and just about everything else. Characters: The characters are a huge part of the design in games, just as they are in other mediums such as novels or movies. The artists who design the characters will have to make something that is both visually appealing, and stays true to the story and lore. Style: Video games come in a diverse range of styles, some using cel-shading, (A cartoonish style, where textures are more akin to blocks of color, instead of gradient complex color blends) some using near-photorealistic rendering, (A style that simply goes for making the graphics look as realistic as possible) some with two-dimensional graphics, or just about anything you could think of. The art style defines the feel and appeal of the game, and has a lot of control over the storytelling. Creation and Refining of Conceptual Designs: In this step, the concept artists work with all the earlier ideas together to produce more refined designs to use in the final game, making sure they all fit together, and maintain a similar overall style. Production of Finished Designs: After good concepts are completed, they are brought into whatever art style the game may choose to use, and carefully fine-tuned and changed until perfection, or something close to it. Animators Receive Assets, and Prepare for Implementation: Once the models are completed, the animators begin their work to bring them to life in-game and in animated advertisements, if the developers wish to use them. Rigging of Models: When they receive a new model to use, often regardless of whether it’s 2 or 3 dimensional, the animators may have been given a model that is more like a solid statuette, rather than a posable action figure. When they “rig” it, they assign sections of the model to “Bones,” which are movable nodes that control the model. For example: Taking all the parts of a model’s forearm, and connecting them to a node located in the model’s elbow, so that when that node is turned, it appears as though the model is bending their elbow, moving their arm and hand. IK Rigs Short for Inverse Kinematic rigs, IK rig is a powerful tool of the animator, used to produce more realistic animations more quickly. For example, without an IK rig, if you tried to move the hand of a model, the arm would remain still, and the wrist would stretch between the end of the arm and the displaced hand. However, with a proper IK rig, the shoulder and elbow would bend and pivot to make the arm stay realistically connected to the hand. Motion Capture + Manual Animation: Motion Capture is a method used to turn the movements of a real actor into in-engine movements. For example, to make a highly realistic running animation, you could have an actor on a treadmill wearing a suit with equipment placed at various locations such as joints to track the rotation and position of each joint, and then translate them to in-game movements. The animations would be saved, and could then be used at any time during the game. Manual Animation is when an animator would manually move and pivot each joint, assigning timings for each movement, resulting in a series of actions that mimic realistic movement. FInished, Animated Models: At this point, all the components of the previous step are used to make the models move realistically, and they will be tweaked to ensure that changing from animation to animation happens smoothly, for example, ensuring that before a character makes jumping movements, they bring their legs together and bends their knees, rather than instantly flying up and stretching their legs while in the middle of a long stride. Implementation of Models: Once they are fully animated, the models can be used in the game, so that there can be controllable characters that move as they should. However, at this point many adjustments that must be made will be found, so the team can expect to make a few more, shorter runs of the animation process to fix the smaller issues. In-Game Models: In-game models are typically of a lower quality than those used in advertising, allowing a player’s computer to be able to try to run the animations in real-time without being overworked. Use in Advertising: For advertising, such as posters and trailers, far higher quality models will generally be used, to produce more appealing footage with which to catch the eyes of potential customers. Final Product: When all the roles, including the artists have finished their work on the game, it is ready for release, with a polished product, and optionally, an advertisement campaign already rolled out. At this point, they get to pat each other on the back, and wait for the incoming storm of issues found by players. No rest for the wicked, or those in software development.