$12256 / $11500
Hello,
This might sound a little weird, but I am a programmer who is seeking to gain experience in game art. I happen to have a degree in Game Development, but who chose to go into general programming because I wanted to help a friend out with his business. I have worked on games with other people, but I never really was able to get them to help me learn anything about making game art. I was hoping that someone could give me pointers on "becoming" a game artist. My desire is to make an open source RPG similar to old RPG games such as the Ultima games, Fallout, etc. using pixel art techniques. While I have found some supposed tutorials on pixel art, they don't go into enough detail to actually make enough sense to enable me to create something. I am a person who can barely draw, but would like to at least get a game started with my own art to try to inspire folks to come into the project and help do both the art and the programming. I could really appreciate some advice and direction on how to begin.
Thanks,
Sean
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I *think* as a more programmer/science focused guy you might have more luck with 3D art than pixel one. the latter really reqires you to have a sense for colors and such, while 3D art is relatively technical.
OSARE (search on this page) is a good example for this. The main artist does "programmers art" (his own description) but since it is all rendered from 3D meshes it actually looks quite good.
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http://freegamedev.net
I checked it out, good stuff. What should I start with? I know of Blender, but the only 3d modeling classes I have ever taken dealt with 3DS Max, which would financially kill me. Is Blender a good program to start with, or are there other modelers worth using for someone who is in my shoes?
My advice is to use the Blender 2.5 beta if you want to jump into Blender. They've made some big improvements to the UI, so it's a lot more intuitive now. Youtube has a lot of good tutorial videos.
Awesome, thanks for the recommendation. I appreciate it.
I'm the OSARE guy. My degree is in Computer Science.
I've always had a slight talent for art, but I think of myself as a very left-brain artist. I treat art like I treat problem-solving in programming -- I try to mimic what I see by breaking it down into lines, pixels, vertices, etc.
Coming from this perspective, expect to spend years making bad art. Don't give up; analyze, read tutorials, try again. It's said that every artist has 100,000 bad drawings in them, and it's best to get those out of your system as soon as you can.
If you're interested in 3D art, the main thing is to not worry about the advanced stuff. Start with box modeling and learn how to make basic shapes with extruding and simple transforms (move/scale/rotate).
Find game art you like and look at it up close. Look at the 2D palette choices, or the 3D facets used. I still do this, pretty much with every new piece of art submitted to OGA.
Thanks pfunked. I am feeling pretty proud of myself already, in just a couple of hours in Blender I made a craptastic house. Probably better than I could have done pixel'ing lol. Thanks guys for a push in the right direction.
I agree it's better for you to go into 3d than pixel art. Both require a certain degree of skill, but with 3d a lot is done for you. You simply set the material properties, camera position, light position and the sprite comes out. And imo it's a lot more forgiving to sloppy work than sprites (don't let that give you an excuse to not go for quality though ;) )
Blender is a good choice I'd say. Especially with the 2.5 series where the interface is much more friendly to newcomers. In addition, it's free, light-weight, multi-platform and is constantly improving.
Seeing you're completely new to 3d modelling and Blender, I'd recommend starting here http://www.blendercookie.com/
For more general 3d concepts and fundamentals, you can also check http://guerrillacg.org/home
Now all you need is time and perseverance, good luck :)
I agree that Blender 2.5 is finally not bad for starting out anymore, but for modeling static meshes and rendering them Wings3D ist probably quicker to learn (since it has a really easy gui) and it is a good moddeling application in general:
http://www.wings3d.com/
But if you feel comfortable with Blender 2.5 stick to it, since in the long run it is for sure the more capable application (and once bmesh is integrated it might actually surpas Wings concerning mesh modeling).
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http://freegamedev.net
Wings does look cool, albeit a little bit old fashioned. The new Blender reminds me of 3DS Max 4.0, which I was somewhat familiar with. Does anyone know of any good/essential GIMP tutorials for working with textures? I figure I should learn the two side by side.
Thanks!
Depends on what you want to do. Work on world textures is usually (if you work with photo sources) only a series of different filters and such, while making textures for (complex) models needs more painting skills. But as before, 3D helps the tech artist a lot. Nowadays you can bake the AO (ambient selfshadowing) and get the texture features from a normal-map bake pretty easily, thus all paining that is often needed are the colors and color patterns. And that is rather easy to do ;)
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http://freegamedev.net
Very cool, I'll keep that in mind, thanks.
indeed, good pixel art looks deceptively simple to make. it is far from it.
Yeah, I was mostly after a style with the Pixel art. I hope that to some degree I can hit that retro look with 3D. I am sure it can be done, since most animated movies are some form of 3D these days and they have that classic look to them. I think modern 3D while it looks realistic, has kind of pissed on artistic quality to some degree in many games. I miss the '80's lol.
Depends on what kind of a retro look you're after. For me the 90s, early 2000s sprites are what I'd call classic and you can achieve some really cool stuff with pre-rendered 3d (the kind you've decided to follow).
http://image.gamespotcdn.net/gamespot/images/2002/pc/featurepreviews/rob...
http://www.disciples2.com/d2/images/screenshots/large/ScreenShot044.jpg
http://www.cheats.ru/uploaded/d/diablo2/diablo2-01145.jpg
http://www.sorcerers.net/Games/IWD2/Screenshots/iwd2_021.jpg
Yeah that's precisely what I am referring to. I just think that a lot of games depend so much on 3D that they have lost sight of the artistic value of what 3D can do. 2D is all about a style, otherwise the art falls apart. I think a lot of studio's these days are getting back on board with stylistic 3D, WoW was actually recognized for being stylistic when it was first out. But so many 3D games seem just to put style aside and go for realism, which to me is boring. But everything has it's place. I am not hating specifically on 3D, I just wish to see more variety in the artistic sense. I just hope I can bring what I have in my head out in my designs. I was never really good with 3DS Max, but then again, I didn't have time to become good because I was learning how to program so I could provide for my family while I was in school :)
Another thing to look at is vector drawing programs like inkscape with which you can produce 2d art with but is a but more techinically oriented.
http://inkscape.deviantart.com has some really good examples of what it can do.