Concept Art is Dead

[Music] we're good to go alright guys hi everybody hi so my name is Shetty Safari I'm founder of one pixel brush which is a concepts to do we just do concept art high-end concept art I think some of the best concept artists that we have and these these guys on our team are from all over the world they all work remotely and they all do just amazing outstanding work and this has been an experiment the last couple years I left Naughty Dog one of the greatest game studios that exists to start my own company and kind of learn the ropes of managing people and since I'm a concept artist too and I I'm kind of on both ends I'm on the I'm in the middle now I train people but I also have our directors above me so I'm gonna talk a little bit about what it's like being an art director kind of when you know both jobs and you're getting used to one but you already know the other so you know some of what I'm gonna talk about is just like the personal hearts and minds stuff of being an artist because that's not really talked about too much isn't a big that's a big factor I think quickly though before I start who here raise your hand if you are an art director okay raise your hand if you're an artist 3d okay raise your hand if you're a concept artist for aspiring concept artists cool alright cool you can aspire I'm only asking because I'm gonna this is I'm going to come at everything from a concept perspective and I'm also going to come at everything from a sort of brass tacks perspective because I don't everything I do was dependent on this company even running if any of this stuff didn't work I wouldn't have a company you know what I mean and arc some of our clients are the biggest game studios in the world and it surprises me that Infinity Ward calls and is like hey can you guys do all our concepts for a new problem new I you know new IP I'm like well damn we must be pretty good because the Infinity word called us like but you know we're always struggling to get better every day and I'm gonna kind of do more of a free-form thing I'm not gonna go through slides one at a time I'm just going to kind of have conversation and pull up images to discuss and I'll stop probably like 10 10 minutes before the end so you guys can ask questions and we can get into some stuff ok here's the first thing I want to talk about and I've talked about this on a Gumroad tutorial series and this is what I like to call let's see here I'm gonna use Photoshop - this is what I like to call the law of increasing awesomeness okay and this has been a really important thing I think in watching talent grow because this if this wasn't possible again this company would not be possible because I couldn't take people who were young and who had a lot of like skill that you can kind of see and make them pro concept artists if there weren't roads and basically what it says is you can kind of wander up this road right this was a dig at Art Institute so I guess Art Center so we gotta bang them so you could you no matter where you're starting you're kind of moving up this mountain right and your artistic growth in your career and there are so many roads to go up you know there's so many ways to get up here to what we would call you know art God now and our God isn't I have some personal our gods I'm sure you guys do too and they're not necessarily better best artists in the world but they are to you you know you don't know anyone better let's say so whoever those people that we can't even imagine someone better and and later I'll talk about finding the right art gods too because again this art God could be here the kind of art God that works on avatar and the kind of out God that works on World of Warcraft is a completely different one do you know what I mean so everything I'm telling you is biased and determined by my personal tastes and that's something that we don't really talk about too much right because we say these are some truisms of art and we all kind of say the same truisms but mine are all gearing towards what my own personal taste is and I get to write and you get to everyone gets to that's your career path should follow your taste and I'm sweetly tethering Wi-Fi my phone I'm so excited okay so I have some internet so this is the style of stuff that I push my guys to do because I like it it's grounded it's realistic and it's grounded and it's realistic and it's grounded and it's realistic I like grounded and realistic so oblivion not Pacific Rim you know what I'm saying although I enjoyed Pacific Rim more than I enjoyed a Bolivian you know what I'm saying like I thought it was a more fun movie I liked it better but that super classy like oblivion you're like how is everything so slick I can't even believe it that's what I personally like so that's what I tell every one of my guys to do and that's what I hire people who have I feel like have that aesthetic so you should know everything I'm saying is filtered through do you want your work to look like this and if you don't you want it to look like something else then maybe some of this applies but not all of it you know what I'm saying because everything I'm gonna say I'm gonna say dogmatically as if that's the truth it is the truth for this but it's not the truth for every style it's the truth for what I like so that's just a rough idea of kind of like what we how we put stuff together now back to this thing the reason this is important is because I have seen people I personally know people who have graduated school with a portfolio that just looks like a normal graduation from college art school portfolio it's just it's just you know it's okay and it's not it's not that bad it's not that bad but you're talking about the people who do concept art professionally for the top companies in the world it's only like I don't know 200 people right I mean how many people are at that high level ditch names that you know how many customers can you name that are amazed there's only like a handful so all those guys didn't get there just through drawing mileage you know they didn't just do figure drawing some of them did like West Burt that guy how many you guys know West Burt amazing I mean okay so there are those anomalies those people that have been doing this every day and if you want to be that guy just go for it like I'm gonna cheer you on all the way but what I'm gonna try to tell you about is there's a shortcut because here's the road I went up well not me Matt Shay you guys know how much a coup CR is now let's bring them up every talk I have because he's one of the best let's see if he pulls up on here oh you know what I have I made folders because I planned [Music] the best alright here's here's some of machay stuff and you're like shut up dude and then he did this too we even talking about just shut your mouth what comic-book style and you can just also do awesome illustration and it's like super beautiful and like beautifully painted and photos but you can't quite tell where the photos were used and some photo in the background and some over painting it's all about the subtleties with him he like knows how to hide his tracks like a mofo I'm keepin it clean even though you put a profanity in the description of this talk which offended me even though I wrote it and sent it to you this you know it's like he's really good at in my opinion he's one of the best and he can do really grounded stuff too so when he started at Naughty Dog we were all kind of like following him and he was like up here and we would all we were all like right here we're like oh there's machay let's go yeah yeah yeah yeah we had no will over on we had no mind of our own because I don't give a he's up there we're down here let's go okay and if you have that attitude you get better so much faster because when I see a lot of artists doing is they graduate and they have a lot of I they have their own way of doing things right and they they feel like artisan exploration right an art can be an exploration you can just kind of go and stop here and there's an avalanche and you fall down and then you start climbing again if you don't know where you're going you can just explore for your whole life for your whole career and no one will fault you for it and if you're west bird for example that guy's been drawing he just went yeah and I'm getting up here screw you guys he didn't need any shortcuts and I admire that that's if you have the time but the the thing I want to just point out is that we're gonna die all of us really soon so you don't have forever you have like a limited amount of time and if you want to be a superstar then just might as well go up the way this other guys going the hard part about it is it's gonna mean giving up some stuff that you might hold dear and things you might truly love about art and I honestly have to say some of the stuff that has changed in concept art is so hard to swallow that it makes art it can make art not fun anymore because maybe you like drawing you know and not drawing just makes it so like I don't want to build 3d or use models that I found you know that's gross to me yeah it's tough sometimes but we watch machay and he would go up here and we'd be like oh there's machay cool and now since I started a company I stopped I'm not very good at are anymore because I haven't done it in like two years alright so I've made a camp right here base camp and I tell people very clearly how to come up this way because I know that way and then I tell them butshe went that way ago and I and I just I can look at them from binoculars but my team is gonna get better than me there's no way around it they're gonna get better than me and you know in two more years if I don't keep doing art I'm gonna eventually they're gonna be like I'm gonna say some art direction stuff and my best guys are gonna be like alright dude like all right whatever you're in charge I guess but I have to listen here right and that you know all of you know art directors like that because that's what happened I can tell I can see it happening to me you can't be Kobe and Phil Jackson it's impossible you have to stop playing in order to coach so this is what I decided to do because I enjoy it now our team is about 10 guys from all over the world and it's worked I've seen it work seen guys go from like terrible to amazing so let me give you an example of someone not one of my team but a guy named John Sweeney he works at Naughty Dog alright and he gave me this idea to have folders on our computer that are called great artistry right in our Dropbox so in great artistry we have the best work that any person has done like a wall of fame and then we have another folder called great shardis tree you know what sharding is because that's what this work looks like and it's all of our work that was the worst just most abysmal stuff okay now I'm gonna show you some of John's barely just graduated and I called him right before to ask him permission to do this some of his just graduating work and some of you might look at this and that's not that bad you're an well it is so okay so it was this kind of thing and this kind of thing which is like rendered not photo reference like hand-painted like I said there's a huge market for that there's a lot of people that do that a lot of games that do that you saw what my taste is right so that's why I don't want this but he wanted to work at Naughty Dog okay and he was doing stuff you know graduating school that looked like that or like this you know because he's not using photo reference he's not loving what's there and plumes of smoke like if you were to Google like you know terrible tragedies are great for video game reference but if you google any wars and you go online you'll find amazing photos of like war-torn areas with people running and what the smoke really looks like and the subtleties of the smoke and the layers and little bits of smoke that's what's beautiful but that's like another level in three months I watched him go from from that to someone who this was his art test probably three to four months and the way he did it was he listened to everything that ate on another artist there and me had told him and he sent us work for constant feedback and when we told him what to do he didn't argue he just did it he's like oh really that's the way you do it okay I'm starting over now this took him a few weeks actually like so much time because there's a lot of people to take the Naughty Dog artists and fail it and then you know like more recently he did this one this is one of his more recent he's gotten even better he's one of his more recent paintings and he really likes his personal thing is that Rainbow six sort of just badass espionage style that's kind of his thing but he went on to get a job there because he changed up his whole style he started using photo reference in different ways he started and this is probably partly from screengrabs he just he added so many things to his technique and he leveled up a millionfold another thing is I wanted to show his examples off of our site and it might be for some of you hard to see the difference you might be like well I don't really see how that one is better than this one or what not this is how this is one of my concepts this is not how I would concept nowadays but this is all hand-painted right the plane is hand-painted there's no photo reference used I probably had photos to look at right to draw from but I didn't actually have any photos in there and the reason this doesn't work is because now with a couple different things the way you use photos and blend them the way you use textures and blend them so that nothing looks too photo II but everything doesn't look campaign it at the same time it looks so much more slick and pro same with characters this is one of our guys that did characters that I couldn't use right because he's doing a dude like why are you panting a dude instead he started finding a picture of a pose dude and like working it into the design now some of you might be like well some of the artistry goes away when you do that when you find the photo right but what does concept art about what's that idea right it's about good idea but we're artists so we like the art of it too but that doesn't mean the good idea you might miss out on a few things in the painting department but you get to express so much more like you would have never drawn this you know you wouldn't have sketched this out this had to be found you couldn't have come up with it and if you had an idea for a flashlight that had Holograms that you could push that's a cool idea if you had to draw it out you probably wouldn't take you a long time to realize that this probably took four hours and the main reason is where the profanity was in the description of this talk it's about the freaking modelers and the 3d artists because you're not doing it for you you're doing it for someone else so I'm surprised honestly how far concept art has come as a field where we just get to loose brush and everyone's like oh cool I'm like oh wow like so many people give us so much credit for being so inspirational that they forget that they could have Google search something almost as it like better so you know and piggybacking off of some stuff Rob said in his talk earlier which was so true that reality is not the be-all end-all you have to plus it [Music] all right so I'm gonna talk about show you this thing this is something I made for some future Gumroad talks that we're doing it's called the four zones of Awesomeness okay and I'll put this online on our website you can get a copy of it and what I tried to do was outline the categories as I saw it they start training these guys from beginning to end as I saw what are the zones of area that can be improved on right what are the zones of areas that can be worked on and I broke it down now this is not going to stay like this this is going to constantly change as the industry changes but I will talk about each one of these things briefly and then I'll go into a little more detail on each one so Chi deenis do you use photo reference and 3d to steal colors get poses exactly right or put out right photographs in your shot as an actual part of your painting and then hide your tracks expertly so no one will ever know like a boss good okay and this is going to refer to all the different ways in which you can cheat and in this one you're kind of cherry picking and part of art directing my team I've noticed because I was telling them over lunch today we had a disaster yet just last night as about to give an art direction talk one of our directors I work with was pissed off at some stuff we delivered and I was like I can't give this talk anymore but it was the reason why was because we approached something with the wrong cheating technique I think and I told my guy what to do and I helped coach him but I coached him in the wrong direction but here's all the ways and you can cheat let's talk about him real quick as an overview just so you know what's possible one of them the most egregious is Google Earth did you guys know that you can fly around cities and Google Earth and like if you're doing a CD shot with Batman or something you can like just find the shot in the city and you have most of the city kind of done you know what I mean or you could just use it to find a nice composition or have good 3d perspective of a city if you were gonna do like a Batman or something posed on a roof and you wanted to just have something to get you going branded you were going to replace all this but you windows for scale even if you replace all these textures do you only mean and imagine how useful that is I mean what a shame to have this and not even use it just to give you a rough idea you have this 3d library of stuff that just exists in real cities 3d modeled for you with textures all over the world for you to fly around think about it we use that sometimes that's Google Earth 3d - I don't have that pulled up do you guys know dads anyone know - let me show you the power of dads real quick so for one of our paintings we had this this is a recent one we did for Ultima Underworld they just met their Kickstarter so congrats to them legendary game designers and they commissioned us to do this piece now this piece I'm going to talk about in and out I'm gonna have like three or four pieces that I keep going back to and discussing because each one has so many parts of what we do in the QI DeMuth department and the design department but yeah this was the basic final and in some ways I have to say in some ways that piece probably the most elaborate we ever done was a financial disaster and that's why it's such a good case study because we're gonna talk about all the things in it that worked and didn't work we almost took every Road and came back to final and we made it what I thought was good but it was weed it hurt us and we learned a lot from it so it was mainly a learning experience but - tada this is how artists block out complicated scenes with lots of characters at our studio just figure it out like this even put basic lights in there so modo if you're in the concept art and you don't know moto you don't know 3d software I would say that's the number one skill you need to have after Photoshop I can't even imagine starting now and not having any 3d it's like you can't almost can't for us again based on my taste you saw what I like based on my taste you can't do any of that work without 3d knowledge and especially because like this he could move the camera anywhere he wants so we could try out a bunch of different things and these models we didn't even make them we just found them online they're freed as hazard library you just get one and if you need to buy one you just buy one they're like whatever 30 bucks you could buy an armored dude for 30 bucks and use that as a start to design a character and then you have a 3d guy that you can pose however you want and then start painting on top of them why are you drawing them from scratch in four hours you could change the design to whatever you want but now you get to focus on the design you have to worry about getting the drawing right you get to focus on the design that's gonna look so slick I'll show you another example of some dad's looking stuff what we got here here's some other zombies we did and it started with dads just kind of like figuring out the basic poses and this was a top-down three-quarter game deadline and we ended up using these as a base and then painting on top of them this guy went nuts with them I'll talk about this guy a little bit more but having that 3d base let him spend so much time on other stuff so much time because you kind of have the same amount of time you got like you know a day maybe to get a character done so get the drawing and pose and it's done in like 20 minutes okay well now you have 7 hours and 40 minutes to work on juice we'll talk about juices in a minute but to juice it Jule shoot okay so that's dad's model you can see kind of how powerful that is what else we got here 3d perspective again using 3d to get our perspective right it's something we also always do especially for anything with architecture so again where the 3d comes in we have this painting you saw on the website there this is an impossible thing to you know stuff space stuff especially you definitely need 3d for and that was our initial 3d block out for that and I'll reference this a couple times because it how we use 3d for this painting is how we use 3d for like a quite a bit of stuff what else we got here but one of those copies of that up here so that's 3d for perspective now you kind of don't have perspective to worry about anymore right your through perspective is all sorted in 3d now is it not important to have prospective knowledge right if you're in school or your learning perspective well yeah it is and it's nice but I don't know why you would use it anymore I mean there probably is a use for it and maybe I know some perspective stuff I'm taking for granted like I'm not aware of how perspective enters into my knowledge of drawing and painting but like man if you can build a 3d model now you're not spending time I mean certainly like learning perspective three-point and like doing all that is a fun exercise but it's kind of like learning pottery if you're gonna do concept art that's kind of a bold statement that's too strong of a statement I'll take that back i rescind perspective is important so that's pretty darn handy what else we got here 3d lighting so that covers that you saw that before he even did some 3d and some lights in that 3d scene and this thing that helped to kind of illuminate the scene and the lights of course are part of the composition you know you start to see different shapes of stuff you put the light where you want a silhouette the characters where you want to lead the eye and it's not you figured out in the lighting department of course it's still pretty you know rough mock-up photo for environment what that means is finding a photo for an environment because again one of the ways in which you run up this hill run up this thing is if someone gave you an environment painting to work on you know a lot of a lot of people in school Oh God so bright a lot of people in school would probably start with well how would you start locking your shapes right hell yeah hell yes block in them shapes F key yeah you get the silhouette right right you kind of start off by like this is a little bit too big because my computer is the worst what's the best laptop guys because I just can't find one tell me after this is brand new it's a brand new $700 laptop okay so you block in some shapes so someone said okay we want you to do this fervent mountain shangri-la like this Ireland type landscape that's like super fantastical and with incredible rock formations and all kinds of cuisine e stuff so you might you might get in there and start like messing around with some shapes you know you paint them in like you do you know you erase them out like you do and you start you start kind of developing some stuff and you might you might have a what's his name stick salesman you guys seen that site The Adventures of stick salesmen it's all a bunch of concept art that has this guy holding a stick in it from all over just random concept art to look it up Adventures of stick salesmen it's really good okay so you know you come up with like an awesome ruff thing right which is which could be cool it's a great way to start you know and it's a great way to kind of get a rough idea well let's say you started fleshing it out from here kind of to that level and again depending on how much mileage you had you do this better like if you had drawn thousands of mountains lots and lots of rocks you would have more of a sense of how they could be formed right but if you hadn't drawn a lot of rocks you do classic you do classic let me do a concept art more concept art tropes you'd have rocks going this way and then you'd have rocks going this way I'm like that's not geologically feasible rocks grow a certain way you can't just have rocks going all different ways the sediment layers on right the sediment layers on and then it lifts the rock up how dare you so we had a lot of conversations about what's geologically reasonable in our at our company so you'd have rocks going different ways so if you had left it at that you would kind of be limited at a certain point because especially when you got into starting to texture it and add all the little bits and pieces you would kind of and especially what your knowledge of geology is and I know that's a weird thing to think about when you're concept art is drawing rocks but like if you want the rocks to feel far away like they're the right scale oh so much cool n da stuff I can't show you damn it but if you wanted to draw rocks that were the right scale you would need something and you had sent me like something that was loose like that so let's say you flush that out I was a little more painterly and I looked up online and I found I don't know I looked up this place the Faroe Islands I'd be like you're fired what do I need you for you're joking like look at that how hard would this be did like change a few shapes on so maybe you started with that but then maybe you went in later or you had this as an inspiration you could do it a lot of different ways you know you could start with the sketch and then you could simplify that out a little bit to kind of match it or you could go vice versa do you know what I mean but if you have the incredible things that exist in the world like this this is called tinned Homer and it's in the Faroe Islands which is a random island chain I mean what the hell are you talking about nature and it's so much more it's it's so much more beautiful and nuanced than that initial thing like that's cool but we've seen that right we've seen that and again we're working with the couple of top studios and there's 200 people so how are you gonna get them how are you gonna get them you're gonna go in there like a crazy person and have an actual passion for the fact that this goes down like that you like wow that's cool if you've ever looked at something so minuscule and stupid like the fact that this drops off and gone like that's that's kind of cool how it does that then you're a crazy person right and that's how you know you've reached your getting up you have your sights on those top 200 people because they're all insane right they have a love for these I love it like I love that everyone has a different thing I don't care about tech stuff but one of my guys when he looks at stuff who did this thing he designed these panels like five or six times on here on the side this computer panel with different types of layouts and he had touch screens and he had nodules and he keeps changing him and he's like I don't like those they look like like they don't look like they look fine it's like they look like and I was like okay you're teaching me stuff because I don't love panels I love rock things so everyone has their own like you think that they'd care about now he's taught me he's trained me he's pulled me up that mountain right cuz we're both here and he's been up here and he's be like no this way dumbass and I'm like no I like it in the tent it's warm in here but he's telling me like no this is the way we're going with tech stuff and he teaches me and part of the reason is because he loves it and has an outstanding eye for tech you know he did this and I love storytelling in people and he's very kind of methodical and just all about the tech so I said you know we had this guy's posed and a lot of different kinds of just like in a generic background and I was like what if it was during the World Cup I'm like what if he's got a kids soccer ball and there's like a little African kid and he wants the soccer ball back and the robots like mm-hmm scanning ball I thought that will be like a fun story so we collaborated collaborating that I said stuff and then he did all the work but like that's a collaboration I'm an art director so but he's got a real passion for how parts and pieces come together you know like how that trim looks how these canisters are how the weathering is what these latches actually do how the hinges would actually work and he'll spend time designing these individual pieces now the only reason he can design to that level of detail and keep messing around with it is again because of course he builds it in 3d and he goes back and forth and he does lots of iterations in 3d and if we're gonna go back to our part our slide here some of the things he used here what's another one keep bashing a7 does anyone know what keep passing yes yeah okay kid bashing is the most egregious of cheating trickery you find someone who has a lot of awesome parts and a lot of people sell their parts online and great 3d modelers who know how to build really beautiful complex things and then you can use them for whatever you want right like this could have been like the inside of some case but this is some serious like skillful modeling but this guy did not model this he didn't model any of these details he just found pieces from this kit and then we just bashed them together it's like sketching but now you're sketching in 3d and you're still have to have an artistic eye right because you might have to concentrate detail only here and give us some rest here like there's a lot of people concept artists nowadays who build everything in 3d they you know really high in concept artists for like the top movies and they just put everywhere but this guy I like him because he's got he's still reserved you know he left an area that didn't have detail on detail on detail again I like Oblivion so he's in line with me we're cool thumbs up we're onward so he built that textured it after that real carefully again that's not fun it's fun for him it's not fun for a normal sane person who likes to draw if you like drawing I gotta go in here and find the right text for this hinge you know what I mean it's like crazy but he loves doing that sort of thing and so that's kind of where his career ends up heading towards photos character we covered that that's photo characters finding a picture of a character photoshoot this one's kind of fun we got a lot to say about this one so I'll start with this our guy leg here after he built the 3d after he built the 3d we had a conversation and he was like how do I do you think I should move forward with this should I build more 3d and I said here's what you could do how much are we billing for this like how much time are we spending on this painting we spent forever on this painting like two weeks I was like go to the store just go to the leather store and just go buy I said well how much can I spend I was like I don't know hundred bucks I don't know like how much money we spend like in a game like 150 million dollars yeah spend a hundred bucks at the store and save yourself some time go buy some but you got to have balls to be this guy you gotta have to you have to really not give a you have to be like I'm buying the booths I'm doing everything I'm dressing up I'm wrapping it and I'm getting in character and he did a lot of poses right he didn't just get this down in one shot and he even took care to match the lighting he put a light on the floor moving up this one's really cool because he's using his iPhone light as a fireball I mean that's that's insane competing with this guy he's a crazy person you know and that's how all my guys are they're all like that because once they all kind of start talking to each other they're like oh I guess it's not crazy to do that I guess that's a totally normal don't another guy that did something similar was on this piece we had this painting that we did for the military for the actual military which was cool actually they had this guy captain long who this division was being retired and you know they do commemorative paintings of the military but now they wanted to give it like a contemporary spin so they hired us to say we got this guy I read a story this guy's story was crazy so it was Vietnam he's fighting off you know the enemy and they started kind of ambushing them in these a cabs and he starts like shooting he runs into the bushes but he runs out he starts grabbing guys and pulling them to safety grabbing him wounded guys one at a time one at a time and then he went up into the top of one of those things and someone had thrown a grenade into it and he had like three guys around him and then he just smothered a grenade and blew himself up yeah that kind of guy so I was like oh yeah we're doing this job for sure so that's him and it was the most badass thing I've ever heard they're doing like a big old commemorative you know ceremony for him and they're retiring this division this is a really fun image to work on but it was a lot of back-and-forth and a lot of like pitfalls but again after Blake had done that other piece this guy's like oh yeah dude I'll take pictures screw it doing it you know so it kind of started a trend of like I guess crazy he's not so crazy movie stills that was something Rob touched on to which I think was really good in that stills from movies and this is again a lot of these things I'm just saying them but I don't even do them that much movie stills is like a new thing that's like when he said it again in his talk I was like we really got do that more but we haven't done it enough and because for movies who get a really awesome sense of really good well art direction and good production design how many guys saw his talk Robb's yeah he had all these cinematographers that I've felt so stupid I was like I should know all these people with weird french names but there's in terms of class right if that's the style that you're into and your aunt you're on board with what I you know the style that I said I liked then these this kind of movie would be an amazing movie to kind of look at for everything you know and looking at something like this when I was telling you Justin for example he had this thing where he cared about those monitors right and he was like really cared about him and I care about rocks you're like well how do I don't care like how do I develop an understanding of what's good design because that's such an ambiguous thing it's over here in this section right here design how do I get like a good sense of it I would say just look at your favorite thing and copy that for the first six months that you do that thing and it's gonna look awesome and then you'll start to develop your own thing and anyway it's gonna be your own thing anyway because you won't be able to copy exactly but you might look at this if you were designing a space outfit and look at his holster look at how it's connected look how it's weathered look at the kind of gun the design of the gun how it's put together these are the best people in the world and these movies come out all the time and how many of you have walked through them and screen grabbed I'm talking to myself cuz I haven't done that enough either but it's messed up because you got all this amazing design information every time a blockbuster film comes out that you can just get yourself going again that's only if you are interested and going up really fast you know that's the copying thing is only for people who just want to go straight up because again you saw the movie did it and the movies up here so you're like I'm going that way but if you want to explore enjoy you know hang glide off this clip do whatever you want but if you want to move straight up just copy people who did it really well shape juice this is one of the biggest I think things in terms of me trying to figure out who I can possibly hire you know to do this kind of work is that they have an awesome sense of shape design and for that I'm going back to the best the best and it's my boy eight on one of the best concept artists I've ever seen and really it's because he knows how to simplify stuff really simplify stuff you'll find a photo like you can see he found some photos but then he'll like blend mode over them or he'll find a photo and he'll simplify the overall shape like maybe he started with the shape like you saw then he put the photos in that added a believable mist and then he blended them out with like a mixer brush tool or with some over painting just enough so they don't look like photos anymore right that's the goal it's to find that exact line and it's a very subtle and nuanced line he also have stuff like this and he's master of this thing he likes to cohesive light that's this thing he loves slices of life so that's shape juice now depending on the job you're working on we have a lot of jobs where maybe we can do that have him be more sexy we try sometimes to have it be simple and clean and sexy but it depends when Eitan is doing his own personal pieces he can do whatever he wants with the shapes right because his shapes are dictating the composition he's literally making shapes and then whatever that shape is okay well that's the tower right in pro concept art and he of course is a pro too but in concept art where you have like a bunch of technical things or a bunch of requirements you can kind of do it but you can't do it as cleanly as simply as he can just because he's got absolutely no restraints but you can try like we started with this piece and you can see that process beginning to end here right just messing with shapes and you can see this is for you guys no cliffy be game developer we started a studio called Bosque EPIK made Gears of War anyway he started in your studio and about two years ago we did kind of all the initial concept art to get his pitch off the ground just like pitch it to get his money to start a studio which was really awesome and really fun but he had this he had this really cool idea bees I can't say anything so anyway but he had these things that were floating and we had to sort of figure out how we were gonna make it sexy at first with the shapes and then try to match it and build the entire thing in 3d just so that we had perfect perspective going into the background and if you look at the final I have to say that little bit of extra craziness with like building a whole 3d model based on a sketch that's inherently done right we could have just taken the sketch and just started to photo bash on top of it maybe we didn't need the model but the model gave us these awesome scale cues and so now this picture you feel like you're like you've really moving through it because you understand the scale really clearly and you know like well that tree is really far so it has to have a much smaller texture than the tree that's closer up so that's shape that's a really difficult one to explain because it's more of a feel color juice I'll skip that one it's a little difficult to talk about simplification and detail control these are the highest level of sort of subtle sensibility that you can have for a concept is the detail control and I was trying to think of a sexier name for it but really it's just detail control and let me show you exactly what I mean that captain long image okay we had this kind of ambient version of it done and by ambient meaning there was no direct sunlight except for on this back tree but I told the artist to paint it kind of in ambient light so that we could make sure it was thumbs up in the ambient light and then later we'll add the sunlight on a separate layer but you can see those trees in the background and this painting or let's say get another one here this one this was his kind of final one that he delivered right before I like we kind of worked on it a little bit me and him back and forth and I touched it up a little bit but this is the final one he delivered and there's a lack of detail control and this is such a nuanced and subtle thing but it like it's that next level it's like between like they're really good and like the superstars is that they just have a sense of it and what that all that means is when you see something that has too much detail like this tree that isn't the focal point they push it back just a little bit and there's all these techniques for doing it one the median filter in Photoshop maybe paint Dobbs maybe like activist art work which is this filter that like adds paint strokes to anything but I'll show you remember what that looked like let me see if I can pull up the next one you see what happened to those trees in the background compared to this now you're like well that's such a nuance subtle thing but you notice how those edges in the background are just softer and they're less texture density meaning there's a couple filters on them on top of them and they're seasoned it's like seasoning a stew just perfectly and you season every little thing and then you get something that when you look at it and you're like well obviously that's how it always should have been duh but it was perfectly seasoned that's something that very very few concept artists I think have an eye for and something that's really hard to teach and something that we're like I'm hammering on them constantly for that kind of thing but it makes a big big old difference composition that's in the sexiness shape juice I think that fits into here composition we put it in three categories because it applies in a lot of these different ways storytelling unis do you notice the story point of the picture you are concept in did you even decide what you're trying to say and are your visual decisions design may help say it now I'm annoyed I might hear that it just annoys me because it sounds like artistic but here's what I mean is there even a narrative in your picture I see so many pieces of art to that there's no narrative to it and a lot of times a concept art there is no directive to have a narrative right your art director may not even require it and our art directors might not they might say just give us a picture we need a landscape shot of this thing we don't necessarily need a story to be told but when we delivered this to cliffie he didn't tell us about this narrative that was supposed to be like a couple guys from the future you know they're from the future because they blue light things and they're sitting around a fire and obviously they're well-dressed they're not homeless so you know they're like sort of well not not completely vagrants there's some sort of action you can kind of tell and one of them starts noticing this thing but the other two haven't noticed it yet there's like a lot of stuff going on it's just one moment why not you don't throw it in there but it has to be simple it has to be clear you see a lot of concepts too with like maybe this is going on right this relationship between what's happening and what's happening and also there's helicopters shooting at each other and you're like oh one thing can ruin it the narrative has to be super simple super clear again if you saw Rob's talk you'll note like it was just the storytelling has to be so simple and so clear and in a lot of those shots in a movie you have more of an advantage right because in a movie you can have multiple shots we're stuck so we already have to jam too much into the into the picture already because it's just concept we have one frame to tell the story in a movie you can cut between them design taste composition we talked a little bit about all those things and we talked about taste a little bit but here's a slide that I helped to kind of underline it again when I'm working on something let's say an environment piece I wanted to have an epic Vista I wanted to have a clear line of action these are all the things that maybe I had wanted the things that were grayed out was the things that the client may have wanted they wanted like a sunny crisp day in the Himalayas the reason this is important is because actually this is a big one let me open one more thing here okay there is the pasture which is this fantasy world that you're allowed to explore in right so a lot of times if you're starting a new IP or something or you're doing your own project you kind of have free rein to kind of do whatever you want or you might have an art director that says just I want you to just explore do you I mean I don't want you to like put any restraints on it right now sort of anything goes and although depending on the IP that could be good if you have all the time and all the budget in the world but our studio this never works for us because we're not like soldiers we're like Navy SEALs we're called in for a specific job to kill a certain person and we come down and we kill them and then we leave and then we shed a single tear and that's all we do so for people who are in a studio setting you're learning the art direction style you have a lot of time to figure it out but we couldn't work for any of those studios you can't have a Crytek call you and be like we need you to do this thing in three days on a brand new IP whatever we deliver the first pass they're either firing us or they're keeping us right we're not going to have a ton of time to explore so what I try to do with my guys and with every client is determine what this Corral is what is it exactly like here's the shape of everything that is possible and then here's the corral that we're allowed to play in and that Corral could be any bit of art direction and that last one it was sunny and it was Himalayas that's all they said right so a lot of people you have two kinds of artists you have cut you have a kind of artist in hiring I've noticed this a kind of artist that says look this Corral I'll do what I want I'll do what I want and that's fair I respect that but you can't work for very long and if you have that attitude and then you have another kind of artists that just cowers here in the corners like just tell me just tell me please please tell me what you want me to draw and that's just maddening that's when I lose my - because this person has died inside and this person is lawless so where is the perfect balance and they're just there is a perfect balance and that is like a Navy SEAL you literally nothing can faze you but you're indestructible and I want someone to have as much fun as they can in this space and that's kind of how I naturally ended up because I'm I like design so I like when you say X plus y equals and I go oh here's a great solution to your problem that I think is a visual solution to all the things you gave me all these parameters and I feel like we solved it beautifully how do you like that I get a lot of pleasure from that but I say and this speaks to anyone who's struggling or starting out in concept art is no matter how small the job or whatever the parameters are that are given to you have a ton of fun in that space do your best in this space because every job is gonna be like this it never gets better it's all gonna be like this you're always gonna have a Corral and it's fun to like have an obstacle course to see what you can do and run around in instead of just running free I get scared if you tell me to run anywhere and do anything I'm like well how do I know if I've solved it it's like you got rid of this and you'll be like come up with solutions I'm like Dee okay does that work I think there's a lot of games and art Direction styles that that are this way - they just kind of like do whatever you want and whatever cool you come up with because the problem with this and this goes all the way back to my taste I like oblivion right I like that aesthetic is that I want all the visual things to come from story things now in games they don't always you know they sometimes do this sometimes don't but a lot of times they don't at least they don't rigorously but I kind of want that so when I see stuff that looks like it had no restraints on it right a design that I can just tell he's got like 45 wings and like eagle eyes and tentacles and like when I could when I see that I'm like this person even if they rendered it well they never had a design problem to solve they're not a designer and you look you see a whole portfolios full of stuff like that you say ten minutes to me okay cool that's the difference between the designer and a concept artist so I'd say oh and one more thing about this Corral my job sometimes with the client is to help build the corral so here's another kind of client you might get we've all had these kinds before and I've been on both sides of it they're like this is the corral that we know about and you're like okay well is he mean and they're like yes you're like cool this he's smart yes is he badass of course so you helped to build with them so if you have a Corral for example an art director gives you a brief that's kind of maybe you don't know fully what it is it's good to ask questions it's hard because it's your boss you know and sometimes they might get annoyed the bleep I don't know what it is I don't know and you're like you don't have to know I'm just trying to find out as much as I can and whatever you don't tell me I'll make it up okay so maybe this isn't decided okay well then I decided your job is to solve as much as you can so even if they don't know the parameters you help them come up with the parameters because you have a you have a passion for it you you heard what the initial idea was and you have things you want to add to it last thing I just wanted to show some sketches for that robot thing because they're just cool look at that comes up like a rooster mmm I just thought it was so bad it was badass because it's not badass it's almost more scary like that this thing would shoot lasers at you and kill you because it's not trying to be tough it's designed just to murder you can tell because no one who was trying to make it cool would design it to look that stupid so it's more scary to me okeydoke all right well I'll stop there and give some time for questions thank you guys by the way awesome fantastic thank you you're welcome about that Corral we're saying yeah you said oh man yeah this guy is he awesome yeah okay is he nice he's nice but what if the client goes hey he's nice and he's mean at the same time or he's a family man and yet yeah you do get a lot of those and if they don't give you enough direction they're gonna come up with they're gonna get a generic design character we had a concept for a character and like I swear they were all I think that's the hardest thing to do anything cool then you know what your only metric short of a story is cool and awesome yeah so so so many things and games are cool and awesome in lieu of a story the only way you can make it unique like in oblivion the guy had in New York Yankees hat right and it looked cool but can you imagine doing a video game character with a New York Yankees hat people would be like that was a future space map marine yeah you'd be like what the hell are you even talking about that's in you're a crazy person the artist needed the story to come up with that unique visual thing so if they don't give you a story then they're gonna get something badass so I would fall back on badass as a default and then if they allow you to go better than badass and more better than cool and awesome then cool then you have good experience basically but I was more of gonna ask you if you had an experience with a client in any of your paintings that had that and where how that went for you all the time yeah and then we just default about us and I get bummed out I'm not bummed out I'm slight it's gonna look good but it just won't be unique hi can I just say really quick that I'm really glad that this lecture went the way that it did considering the title because I'm an art student graduate who just graduated a few months ago this is my first time at GDC oh nice show up here and to see that shiny Safari is hosting a lecture called concept art is dead oh no no I was just weirded in the area I was bummed out they call and then four hours since I got here at noon just like having out on the verge of a heart attack oh my god anyways you mentioned at the beginning of your lecture there was a gentleman who his art improved drastically over the guidance of your studio consilina yeah yeah do you know how another young aspiring concept artist might find the same sort of mentorship yeah he had a Akon so you had to make friends with the right people okay I mean honestly like if you have a team of people eight on started in school he got picked by Rob we did a talk earlier out of school because he was talented super talented so his portfolio was awesome but in ODIs where he went to school he had a team of like four other guys and they would all forget the teachers they would all work with each other and they would one-up each other one-up each other and they all had a really positive attitude like I don't know about you but when I was in school I did not have a good attitude like every other artist was a threat to me so I was I was just a bad person so it wasn't until I until I decided like no I'm gonna be inspired by others people's work instead of hate it now you can hate you can go through the cycles right it's cycle you look at it you're like wow like this thing but as long as you end up at what can I learn from this person then you travelled the full path right okay so but find a team of friends yeah or online I've seen a lot of people on Facebook I've hired half my company from Facebook so I see their art and I'm like that's really good do you want to try this job out I'll give him a test job to try out no art test no nothing just just do this job because now we're both invested try it out and see if you can get there and I've had people that have sent me stuff over the course of two years on Facebook and then finally they just get good enough and I start giving them jobs fantastic thank you yeah you're welcome that's it cool go ahead you have to go to the mic they told me to tell you they only give me one rule they have to go to the mic yeah that's cool so far art can be something that gives more expression if it's more cartoonish or more you're going for any realistic things and what would you to bet more than something else Oh like if you're saying you're asking if it wasn't so realistic if you're doing a style that wasn't as realistic yeah well actually I never got to it but I wanted to show this this was a much more stylized thing that we worked on and it was for spark and they gave us the sketch and after we had the sketch and we were supposed to kind of flesh it out they give us this very cartoony sketch even after we had the sketch already done we still built it in 3d and then rendered it after we built the 3d so the technical stuff I think still comes into play no matter what and we have like for example more realistic let's say stylized section on our website and I'm actually trying to get our studio more into stylized work but we're known for realistic stuff but we have more stylized stuff and for that maybe not all the techniques apply like maybe this one wasn't done in 3d this one was like hand drawn and then filled in like you know each color was filled in as a flat color and then it was slowly rendered and shaded by hand was kind of a little more traditional but what's crazy is this more artistic stuff that takes more art skill is way harder I think way harder and part of the reason that I think our companies move towards realistic is because it's easier to cheat for this you need real drawing skill and real drawing skill that you must have for this is more rare than it is someone who can train to like get past something yet or everything has its place but I think if you really like hand drawing and you really like cartoony stuff for the drawing and design part everything traditional is perfect then for the rendering part maybe sometimes three the shape design stuff like here in the environment still apply exactly the same color stuff Theory still applies this started from a photo you can see right here if you click on there it started from a photo so I didn't even make this up and you can see some of the steps from like photo to kind of more cel-shaded but going off the photo and then rendering it out a little bit more one step at a time taking photos of actual people to have like exact poses but gives better expressions you know most of the time like for example I'm just trying to say if you have someone who if they said design an animated feature character that wouldn't work so part of the challenge is like for me and for my guys is being like of this card deck of awesome tricks which one can I use now maybe none of them use the wrong one it won't work at all you're saying for like a cartoony animated feature it's annoying cuz you can't use any of them because all you need is drawing ability like none of these things really apply right and that's really that's why it's III we have one artist that's like amazing at animated style stuff but she's really rare so yeah I would say if you like drawing and designing cartoony characters keep doing that once you start getting into the rendering of them then you might use some cheats cartoonish like to improve like that person you showed who improved in like three months really well oh I gotta improve in your cartoony drawing style I don't know because that's a really tough and actually I don't know enough about how to do it well myself it's even but I did take a class with a guy named David Coleman David Coleman he's a animator at Paramount and I took a class at the concept design Academy here in LA know we're in San Francisco in LA concept design Academy has outstanding classes and and he taught me everything that I currently know I hadn't been in school obviously in a long time but I did a lot of these characters he's cartoony things in his class because he taught me a lot of things about shape design and stuff thank you sure he's got online he's got DVDs look him up David Coleman hi well I should say to start off to contextualize this a little bit I'm a producer and I'm regularly told I've got the artistic acumen of a blue munch so I'm more than aware of I'm coming at it from a different angle to everybody else in the room and yeah I'm sorry that you all have to listen to me I worked when I worked with Wizards of the coast on the match of the governing stuff I watch some really talented concept dudes and also they had their own concept people but one of the problems I had was my internal guys a couple of them specifically and these were the kind of guys they had personalities they they knew their their shared they would go skydiving and deep-sea diving and water rafting cook-off cisterns and whatever else but as soon as you put them in the room with the client you asked them to take some notes they would start chewing their bottom lip switch off and I ended up as the producer somebody doesn't understand our particularly to that now technical level trying to be a bridge between these two people and my question is do you have anybody on your team who has those kind of communication issues where they switch often and what tools do you use to get the client to communicate with then well in our case none of them have to communicate with the client everything goes through me so my guys never talked to the client but I do have guys that I have the opposite thing I have I have a lot of I have a handful of guys that are really quiet you know they have a really hard time opening up and so I try are your artists that the skydiving base-jumping super man artists are they are they good yeah well I'm truth their stuffs good which stops good yeah yeah I trust that but yeah that's that's awesome man as long as they're really good yeah like I have I always thought myself because I have a you know kind of I'm a loud personality I always thought you had to kind of be a loud personality to be good at art because that's part of how you see the world not true at all I have guys that have more passion about every tiny little thing in art who speaks so softly and barely utter a word when you say anything to them and I just decided okay part of the value of managing a team of people is that I constantly adapt my personality to their personality so if they're slow when I call them on the phone to ask them what the thing is I just hold it up and I go hey dude how's that piece coming and this is what they say good and I and I take a deep breath I sit in the chair when before I call them and I know okay this is gonna go a lot slower than the way I speak and I kind of cater myself to them because I think that's valuable and because for them I that's kind of part of the personality of the job and from watching house of cards I learned a lot right a lot from that show thank you you're welcome guys I brought a ton of business cards if you want to get in touch with me for anything there's just a stack of him take whatever you want because I brought them just to be taken and I'll hang out for whatever I'll talk to everybody for a few minutes like if we're gonna talk after for a few minutes and then go on to the next person because I know how it is when you're waiting to talk to someone for like 40 minutes and they're talking to one person forever you know what I'm saying so I'll try to keep it quick so I'm not interrupting you I'll just talk and then we'll just keep moving if you want to stick around we'll keep talking got it thanks guys you

Channel: GDC

Views: 501,408

Rating: 4.5470824 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, concept art

Id: CYbYvImd7Bw

Length: 65min 13sec (3913 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 19 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Cu_de_cachorro]

This is not a very good GDC talk, the guy felt like he has not prepared for the talk and just winged it, talking about the subject on a very surface level. He also seems to treat a lot of personal preferences as truths

[u/rowtechshio]

Can I get a TLDR

[u/ZuBsPaCe]

Had a lot of fun watching this. Really good and funny presenter with a very strong background as a concept artist and art director. Shows how to improve and speed up your concept art by starting from photo or 3d references and goes into the different ways to approach new art.

Thanks for posting!

[u/Soldat_DuChrist]

Concept art is important in the process of game development. It's acts as a beacon for the entire team to aspire after, to capture the emotion it provokes; keeping everyone on the same page