Jeff Zugale Art Blog

More Sci-Fi Environments

2011-11-02T21:34:00.000-07:00

Finally had some time to finish the third page of these! Had to cut it into 3 pieces:

Here's what the whole page looks like in one piece, in case you're curious. It's drawn on 14x17" Canson Newsprint.

Been pretty busy with client work and baby care. Tomorrow I'm working on character designs for an animated project... hopefully I'll be able to do more of these soon.

Sci-Fi Environments

2011-09-19T23:31:00.000-07:00

Got this one to where I could post it - as usual, paid work gets done before personal work! Another big page of environment sketches, broken into two pieces:

The bottom one of the first image looks a little generic but that's not always bad. I like the other 3 more, though. The vertical one I'm giving the lofty title "Cititram Approaches the Imperial Museum of Space Flight & Exploration." The hexagonal pattern in the sky was where I did a quick rough of what a giant dome ceiling would look like - maybe this is on Trantor. But it's not worth the time to lay out an accurate geodesic dome on paper, since I can make one in 3D and layer it in. Anyway, getting better. Starting another page immediately.

I guess once I have enough of these I'll put up a poll and let you guys pick which one(s) I should go to paint on, what do you think?

Environment & Ship sketches

2011-09-13T12:55:00.000-07:00

Last few days I've been sketching on paper to reset and review, as I continue my quest to drastically improve my personal portfolio. First a few environments:

Then 3 quick ships:

There are problems with all of these, some more obvious than others Just trying to set problems for myself in all the many aspects of concept work - design & design language, drawing technique, composition, work output per time available, and more. As I keep doing these they'll get more ambitious in terms of technical difficulty and also trying to really focus on doing better, more interesting design. So as I keep going I'll be addressing the problems I see in these and trying to improve.

I'm doing these on 14x18 Canson newsprint with a 30% Cool Gray Prisma marker and my HiTec-C pens; these are all on one sheet which is too big for my scanner. I'm using the low-quality paper because it helps me remember to relax and just draw and not be too serious or tense about it. It's just a sketch, and I've got my scanner to capture anything that comes out really well.

New concept painting

2011-08-23T21:55:00.000-07:00

About 2 hours total work in Painter and then Photoshop. I used a couple of different techniques, first some custom-shaped brushes in Painter, then comped in one of my other recent paintings to add texture, color, light and random shapes to try to "see something in the clouds." That technique is from Feng Zhu's recent YouTube tutorial. In this case it turned into an android or maybe a large mech (I didn't put in anything to show scale) in some wreckage.

Sketch Plus Scalzi

2011-05-19T15:45:00.000-07:00

Hey, long time no blog! Here's a new sketch I did recently, working from John Scalzi's novel The Android's Dream (with his permission of course).

Glar-Class Destroyer ideas - pen on paper

It's a couple of ideas of a spaceship described in the book called the "Glar-Class Destroyer," a ship that in the overall Galactic course of things is a mid-level military vessel, but which related to Earth's starfleet represents an overwhelming, unbeatable threat.

The larger drawing is how the ship appeared in my head when I first read the book. The smaller drawing resulted from me looking at the first one and saying to myself, "hmm, that's pretty cool, but y'know, I think it could look more dangerous, more sinister. It's supposed to be striking terror into the Earth ships that might have to confront it." So I tried another pass looking to make it much scarier. I think it works, it looks much more likely to try to devour you when it attacks. I'd be pretty unhappy to see that pop out of subspace if I were playing Star Trek Online or something.

If you follow me at all, you know I've done some work for John over the past few years. All that work has been done over the Internet and by phone, with us never meeting in person. Happily, John's on a book tour for his new Fuzzy Nation novel and made a stop here in LA, so I was able to go to his appearance at Barnes & Noble and finally meet him. Since I'd just done it, I gave him the original of this drawing! Here's pix, so you know it happened... heh!

it's a handshake deal

"It came from inside my brain!"

Was great to meet John! Hope someday to be able to hang out for a while longer and get some Double-Doubles (Animal Style of course)! (photos by Mrs. Z)

Walking Scout Vehicle

2011-02-25T13:08:00.000-08:00

Trying to get back into a sketching rhythm:

Walking Scout: pen & marker on paper

Just a quick little vehicle thing, following the Doug Chiang/Feng Zhu process.

Modeling a Sukhoi-17 in Blender

2011-01-28T00:18:00.000-08:00

Here's a couple shots of the model I've been working on, an old Soviet Sukhoi-17 attack fighter:

Su-17 flat color render

Su-17 partial texture render

I'm pretty happy with this model, it went pretty quickly. I have some good reference, some really comprehensive 1/72 scale model ortho drawings that I found online, so it was pretty easy to build "tracing" over those images. The texture paint is a very quick rough out using my first try at UV Unwrapping, which I need to learn more about. The particular method I used stretches the pixels along the top and bottom centerlines, so I need to figure out a better way.

OK bedtime. I'll update this again soon.

Today's Output

2010-12-20T21:26:00.000-08:00

Got a few things done today!

Megabus concept, toned: PS CS5

First, tone-painted the "Megabus" concept sketch from a few days ago. I did this live on my UStream channel earlier today with a small audience.

Megabus Gray: PS CS5

This is a grayscale version, just done with a Color layer filled with black. I'm not sure whether I like the color or gray one better. I think the gray one looks more "classic concept" than the other one. Either way it works okay.

Bulk Cruiser concepts: PS CS5

These ships I drew last night while UStreaming, some quick ideas for the Bulk Cruiser from the first part of the Stars' End book. It's supposed to be a freighter with some guns bolted on to it, so I wanted a blocky cargo ship vibe. These are okay, not really knocking me out but a fair place to start. Today I put in the grays after playing in Photoshop to make a big fat wide marker brush to imitate my Copic Wides.

Pleasure Cruiser concept: PS CS5

This last one is from one of the tiny little 1-inch sketches; I challenged myself to go from the blown-up rough line sketch to a tighter line and marker render in 30 minutes. It took more like 40, but still pretty decent. There's a form problem in the rendering, which I'll fix later.

Han Solo 3-View, done for now

2010-12-19T21:18:00.000-08:00

I've gotten to here:

3-View Env #3: PS CS5

And I've decided to stop at this point, because I'm starting to zoom in on too many details, which means I will start noodling and working on this too much. These aren't supposed to be tight and the whole point is not to put too many hours into them, so I can up my output and get faster.

I think these are at the point where I could show them to an AD and they'd get it, though I think the bottom one is a little rough to show a film director.

Eventually I'm going to go to a full paint on at least the top one and maybe the middle one.

Plenty more cool scenes in the book, but I think for the rest of the night I'll work on some of the vehicles from it, maybe the gladiator droid. Comments & crits welcome as always.

New 3-Environment Progress

2010-12-19T14:28:00.000-08:00

Here's where I'm at on the latest 3-view painting. I'm doing scenes from the Star Wars EU book Han Solo at Stars' End by Brian Daley, a book I've always liked:

3-Env #3: PS CS5

Obviously I've put a bit more time into the top one than the other two, but they're reading fairly well so far. The scenes are (top) Han and Chewie meet Rekkon at the barge landing bay, (middle) trying to escape the Data Center building, looking down from the balcony as the Espos set up a large blaster, and (bottom) Bollux tries to survive the Mark X Executioner droid as Han returns to the Stars' End arena dome. I've left the line art in at 50% as they're still pretty rough and undetailed.

I think these are going to turn into much more finished paintings once I'm done with them as quickpaints, but I'll put a couple more hours in to get them all to a reasonable state before I move on to more 3-views.

Learnin' Some 3D

2010-12-14T13:01:00.000-08:00

Since my "draw brain" failed utterly to function yesterday, I decided to put some time into learning more 3D modeling. I can't afford Maya or 3DSMax at the moment so I'm using Blender, which is free! I did a few tutorials from the Blender site, but then I built this jet plane model from scratch, no tracing:

Jet Airliner: Blender 3D Model

Kind of like an MD-80. I think it came out pretty well, though I wouldn't call it optimized for use in a game. I know AD Damon wouldn't be impressed to know it's about 4700 polys (tris, not quads, I remember hahaha... it's 2346 faces, 2217 vertices). They'd throw it back and tell me to make it in 1500! Should be possible, I used 32-sided cylinders, can probably go to 16 for the body and 12 for the engines which would cut the polys by more than half.

I'm not worrying too much about textures right now, need to get comfortable with modeling first.

Anyway, just trying to keep up with the times and make myself more valuable as an artist. Concept people who do 3D are fairly rare, though that's changing.

Now why is there Steve Miller singing in my head...?

Improvement, yay

2010-12-12T23:17:00.000-08:00

Here's today's 3-up environments:

3-Env 02: PS CS5

Better. I think these work a lot better. Still taking too long - about 5 hours - but I'll get faster as I get more confident. Here's what they looked like at 2.5 hours:

3-Env 02 still rough

I decided that in the top one, the light coming down on the spaceship didn't fit with the wedge-shaped docking bay entry - it wouldn't hit at that angle, the ship appears much closer to us. So I changed it to a round hatch directly above, which seems to make a little more sense.

I also thought the shapes in the underwater base buildings were boring so I repainted them. The new shapes are probably cheez but they feel better overall. Looking at that one I think I'll want to brighten up the light coming from the sea cave some, the image is pretty dim.

And keeping with yesterday's pattern I tried to bang out another vehicle sketch in an hour. Couldn't get it past line art in that time but it's pretty decent:

Megabus LA 2020: PS CS5

I'll do the quickshade on this tomorrow after the next 3-up painting I guess. Much less frustrated today, which is a good thing. Maybe I'll actually sleep well for a change.

Illustration, Iteration, Frustration

2010-12-12T01:18:00.000-08:00

Here's a couple spaceships from this evening:

Sport Cruiser spaceships: Photoshop CS5

I'm trying to do anything and everything I can, within the limited working time I have now, to increase my output, learn new techniques and get better at painting. Been watching Feng's videos - I went through all of them, actually, over the last week - so I'm returning to following his lead and working on stuff that shows a high level of professionalism.

So after watching Feng's latest Design Cinema, I thought I'd try his suggestion of doing 3 environment paintings in the same file simultaneously, and started this:

3 environments, same file: PS CS5

I managed to get to this point in about 2.5 hours, but I've stalled out. For some reason my brain is not letting me figure out how to take these further... which is very frustrating. I'm using pretty simple forms in all of them because I want to do the technique without having to do too much design work, I want to concentrate on value, lighting, mood, atmosphere and composition instead.

They're all at about the same level of completion, but I think the middle one reads and works best. I feel like the background looks especially good on it, I did use some photo for the clouds but everything else is painted, I only laid in the clouds as a desaturated overlay onto the sky colors. The top one's okay, but the bottom one is falling apart for me. There's some simple perspective things that need fixing, which won't take long, but the whole thing just isn't working for me.

So I hit a wall. The next step is to just keep going with details, but for some reason my brain doesn't want to paint detail at a "mid" level, it wants to zoom all the way in and do really tight stuff. I have to not do that, and it's actually really difficult trying to find that middle ground. More practice I guess.

Once I realized I was getting really upset and not progressing, I said screw it and did something I know I can do, zapped out a couple of spaceships. That only took an hour! At least I can do that no problem.

I really do need to get the production painting thing down, though, or I'm not going to get the kind of work I really want to do. I guess I'll start another 3-shot tomorrow and see if I can improve.

Hey, More Sketches!

2010-10-26T14:55:00.000-07:00

While I continue my deliberate absence from Internet Social Media (so as to avoid distractions that eat my time), I'm still sketching stuff. Here's three that I finished in the last week:

Scout/Recon VTOL:

Alien Scoutship:

and Patrol Shuttle:

All done on paper with pens and markers. The first two were done by taking a couple of the tiny tiny thumbnail spaceship sketches that I did quite a while ago, which are only maybe an inch across:

(click for actual size, 72dpi)

Scaled them up to fit 8.5x11 in Photoshop. For the Scout, I grayed the drawing back to 50% and printed it out, then traced over it with 10% marker on good marker layout paper; for the Alien, I changed the drawing to a light blue line, faded it back super-light, then printed out on regular paper. From there I did more work with 10% marker and then went to the Pilot pens.

For Patrol Shuttle, I took a 10% marker and just made a bunch of random squiggles and lines on a sheet of paper. Then I took a 30% marker and went back over it, picking out shapes and lines that caught my eye. It stared looking like some kind of vehicle so I rolled with that and eventually got this.

These were fun! I'm gonna grab a few more of the tiny sketches and keep going. I've got a lot of them that I think look pretty cool.

Another Sketch

2010-10-04T11:33:00.000-07:00

In today's sketch, looks like I'm channeling my teacher Feng Zhu; here's the Missile Corvette:

Long hood + short deck = muscle car, so "corvette" (also a coastal defense ship smaller than a frigate but larger than a cutter) seemed appropriate.

Frustration? Draw, Draw, Draw.

2010-10-02T23:56:00.000-07:00

I've been kinda frustrated lately, artistically, creatively. I'm not doing enough of my own stuff; my comic has stalled and between my commercial work and taking care of our son (which is pretty awesome, but of course it's time-consuming) I just have been antsy and struggling in my mind.

If you're an artist, you can't struggle in your mind. You have to work it out on paper, or whatever medium you're most - or sometimes, least - comfortable with. For now, I'm going back to root, familiar things: concept sketches on paper with pen and markers. Figure I'll share, ya?

Sci-Fi Tank:

Twin Fusion Test Ship prepares for launch:

Super Slot Racer:

All done with Hi-Tec C pens, Prisma and Copic Wide markers, white Prisma pencil and gouache for hilites. Old school style, no Photoshopping except to sharpen as they're rezzed down. All the warts are there.

Trying to do one of these every day, but practical concerns kinda make it every couple of days. Are these design genius? No, they're feeling very "student" to me, but they're a decent start. Gotta dump all the crap out of my head to get to the good stuff, it takes a while.

A Few Sketches

2010-09-13T10:44:00.000-07:00

I've been doodling on paper when I can, thought I'd share some with you. Here's some random spaceships and image frames:

Playing with a book-cover-ish layout, plus more random:

A couple of pages of Ringworld Flycycle designs:

And finally yet another page of random spaceships (I have thousands of these):

What Happens When I Fail

2010-09-02T00:33:00.000-07:00

I'm a bit apprehensive about posting this, but here goes: a tale of artistic failure.

To be fair to myself, this happened in the context of my wife and I preparing for our baby's birth, the actual birth itself, and on top of all that, doing a lot of freelance work. I simply could not put in the kind of time I spent doing, say, my Steampunk Tortoise and Hare.

I'm not really broken up about failing this way under those circumstances - clearly, I had more important concerns! - but still, it's useful for an artist to confront a failure and figure out what happened.

So earlier this year, CGSociety (of which I'm a member) posted the annual InVidia NVArt contest. This year's theme was "Syd Mead: Accelerate" - with the challenge to create an illustration of some kind of vehicle or transportation system in the design style of the legendary illustrator. Now, I'm a huge Syd Mead fan, he's been a major influence on me in many ways, so to me this is seriously exciting. Even better, the contest is being judged by not only Syd Mead himself, but some other people whom I admire, including BoingBoing's Mark Frauenfelder, Lorne Lanning of Oddworld fame, and none other than the mighty Mythbusters, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman.

I am all over this contest. I am going to go nuts on it and do a really amazing piece. At least, that's what I thought at first.

So I start sketching. I had two possible ideas in mind: giant stratospheric airships and a "bus train" for the streets of Los Angeles. Here's some of the sketches of the dirigible (I never got to develop the bus idea) (click to enlarge, as always):

For the giant dirigibles, I was trying to grok Mead's shape language. He uses pure arc curves (parts of circles) rather than accelerated curves like you see on modern cars or aircraft, and tends to juxtapose more linear and geometric "graphical" cuts and surface features.

There's a kind of "revolving carousel" thing here that cylindrical passenger and cargo pods get loaded onto, and then rotated upwards into the body of the airship. Some of the ideas have more than one carousel. The rest of it is a truly gargantuan helium gasbag containment system, with a rigid frame made of 3rd-generation composite materials.

However, another attribute of Mead's work is that for "real world" items that he's designing, he doesn't go too far off into "fantasy-land," the overall design of the object tends to be fairly prosaic in many ways. This is most evident on his yacht designs, where the shape of the vessel isn't a radical departure from existing vehicles. Some of his cars are pretty wild, but the ones you can actually build with today's tech look like todays cars, for the most part.

The first sketches I thought were a little too much in fantasy or scifi land; I felt that maybe I should tone back the design to something that looked more, well, logical in some way, something that we could build in 20 years or so. So I started working toward that.

You can see on some of these that I did sketch copies of some of Mead's designs, trying to keep them in mind as I tried various looks. Also, you can see I'm starting my composition ideas for the illustration.

In hindsight, I think going for a more real-world look was a mistake. Who knows what a stratospheric dirigible made of super-lightweight composites and fabrics would look like? Especially since my thought on their function was that they would use the world-girdling Jet Stream winds as their primary motive power. The whole point of these would be to use far less fuel to fly people all over the world; jet fuel is getting very expensive and it doesn't look like it's going to get cheaper. At some point it will be uneconomical to burn it.

To solve that potential problem, these huge airships would float along at 35,000 feet using almost no fuel at all, while specially designed planes would bring passenger and cargo modules up to them, and take them back down to local airports when the airships flew close to their destinations. So it's a crazy, exotic sci-fi solution to a problem that would most likely be better solved by trains, but hey, that's the fun of it.

So finally I settled on this last shape. Again in hindsight, this is not a very interesting shape - but then, a Zeppelin isn't all that interesting in shape either. It's just a big cigar shape with some fins. A Zeppelin's most interesting attribute is its sheer size - and my airship would be something like 50 times the size of the Hindenburg in order to have enough useful lift to carry the equivalent of 20 757s worth of containers.

Still though, this is an illustration for a design contest, not a product pitch to Boeing. Yes, a real one of these would probably have a very simple overall shape, but that doesn't make for an exciting piece of art. Thus, right from the start I'm making a mistake - really, a crucial mistake.

The pencil layout is pretty straightforward. I like the composition in general; I'm showing a view of one of these behemoths from inside the dining lounge of one flying nearby, and everything's got a nice angled rake back to the vanishing point, which is inside the image - another thing Mead does very often. There's a "scenario" happening, with people in shot enjoying dinner and the spectacular view, another Mead staple. It puts the viewer into the picture in a comfortable way.

On the value pass, I'm going for a dark frame in front to really set off the bright airship that has the sun shining on it. Pretty standard stuff.

On the first color pass, I start feeling like this is going south on me. This is a really drab color palette, but I didn't notice that right away, at least not consciously.

I got all the way to this point of detailing before my wife happened to see the piece, and pointed out that the image just looked really drab and lifeless. I decided to color it up by putting it in a "golden hour" sunset color scheme, which took several hours of trial and error with Photoshop layers and some significant changes to the shadows. This helps, but still... the subject shape is unexciting. Even the most vibrant colors won't hide that.

Still, I struggled on, trying to pull something good out of it. This is as far as I got before the deadline; it's very unfinished in terms of all the details. However, even if I finished them all and things were very polished, the extra detailing would not really help much. The ship isn't an eye-catching design, and now it's clear that the view angle is also not very exciting, either. There are a number of problems with believability in the details, like the window supports and the mountains. The high cirrus clouds are just super-quick sketches with no finish, so they look pretty poor; also, they kind of lead the eye out of the top of the image never to return, which is a big no-no. Details like that could be fixed with time, certainly, but I ran out.

Though I did submit it to the contest, this is just plain not worthy of it or of myself. I can do far better. I feel bad that this is what Syd, Adam, Jamie, Lorne and Mark saw of my work. In that context I probably shouldn't have bothered putting it in, but I felt the need to show that at least I tried. (I take some solace in knowing that Adam and Mark at least have seen some of my better stuff like the Wheaton/Scalzi/UnicornPegasusKitten painting - which, by the way, I also executed during this same 3-month period. So, my priorities were in the right order.)

So that you can see what I was up against, and why I'm calling this a major fail, here are the winners of the contest. Even the Honorable Mentions are way beyond what I've done here, far more Syd Mead-ian. I must admit I was pretty crestfallen when I looked through the entries right after I submitted mine.

Now again, this contest happened during the final 3 months of my wife's pregnancy. The deadline was a few days after the baby's due date, so I'd figured I'd spend the first 3 weeks of May finishing up and polishing the painting. However, he was born 3 weeks "early" (though still full term and perfectly healthy!), so that just didn't happen. I put maybe 20 hours total into this, when I'd planned on more like 100. So really, given all that, I'm amazed I got even this far.

We certainly didn't fail with the baby. He's the best creation I've worked on so far, and probably will ever work on. I don't really mind blowing a contest entry because he came along. :)

What have I learned from this? Design, design, design is crucial. Never forget the purpose of the final piece, as that tells you what your design needs to encompass. I lost sight of that and this is the result; a really cool design rendered sketchily would have been far better than this fairly well-rendered bad design - and in fact, the 5th place winner was just that, a fairly loose, painterly illustration of an unusual, interesting and deceptively simple design idea.

Next time, I'll be sure to put way more time into designing my subject matter, and I won't stress about trying to nail a super-slick final piece.

Also, never plan a project around on a baby's due date. Most babies are not born on the date the doctors will tell you they'll arrive!

I hope you've found this enlightening. Comments are most welcome.

Sheer Madness for a Good Cause, with Scalzi and Wheaton!

2010-05-30T16:59:00.000-07:00

Behold, the madness we have wrought:

Yes, that's TV's Wil Wheaton in the Infamous Clown Sweater, flying a giant unicorn-pegasus-kitten and about to attack an Orc version of SF writer John Scalzi with a spear.

This image is to inspire writers to create a story based on it, which will eventually be put into a book whose profits will benefit Lupus Alliance of America! John explains it all on his blog. I have a good friend with Lupus so I'm double-happy about the whole thing.

Here's the process, if you're interested...

John called me up and described the idea. Of course, I freaked; how could I *not* try to make it happen? So I whipped up a few pencil sketches (digital, in Painter 11):

John liked the first one, so I did a more finished sketch:

With this approved, onwards to painting! Here's the first rough color pass. I reversed the image per request from John:

Next stage, I was pretty sure I wanted volcanoes in the background, but decided to try some lightning to see if that worked:

Next, worked on the unikitten's face and a bit more on the orc:

Next, more details on kitten, orc and the INFAMOUS clown sweater:

Continuing, let's get those volcanoes in there, shall we?

Now, it's time to really try to nail the faces. I had photo reference for Wil from the Web, and John sent me some truly epic photos of himself making awesome orc faces:

Eh, still needs some work, keep going...

There we go, that's a lot more like it. Tweaking details and messing with brightness, color and saturation; the blue-gray kitten wasn't doing it for John, so he asked me to try another color. I settled on a warmer brownish look:

Almost finished, just dealing with the last bits and the background:

And there you have it. This was seriously fun, though the timing, coinciding with the somewhat early birth of our son, made getting it finished a major undertaking. Thanks John and Wil!

iPad with SketchBook Pro

2010-05-06T12:17:00.000-07:00

Here's a little landscape sketch I'm doing in SketchBook Pro on my iPad. Looks like it's Mars! Painting in SBP seems to work pretty well, even using a fingertip instead of a stylus. It's a little weird sometimes trying to figure out exactly where the brush tip is under the finger, but it's easy to zoom in if you need more precision.

I don't think SBP will be a replacement for Photoshop and Painter for final production work, but for doing rough sketch-paint layouts? It's great! I can paint on the couch, or in bed at night without needing a table for the laptop and holding a tablet in my lap, or worse schlepping my Cintiq to the living room and dealing with all that. I normally use a plain old clipboard with copy paper on it for sketching anywhere, and now with the iPad I can do digital painting the same way.

I also got a program called ArtStudio, only $1 (wow!), that seems to have a nicer "pen" drawing algorithm than SBP. Here's some quick little spaceship sketches from it:

You can see it's not as precise as if I was drawing with a pen, but it's quite serviceable for line sketching. ArtStudio's pen tool smoothes the lines automatically in a nice way, and you can see the line weight has a nice cursive variability. It's not pressure sensitive, but each stroke starts thin, goes thick and then ends thin again in a realistic sort of way.

I've got a Pogo Sketch stylus on order, will be interesting to see if that makes a difference. I'm pretty sure someone will be putting out a Bluetooth-connected pressure-sensitive stylus sooner than later, and that will turn the iPad into a real pro-capable art production device.

Secret Project: Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi

2010-04-07T11:26:00.000-07:00

I'm flabbergastingly pleased and honored to be able to tell you about a project I've had to keep quiet for many months: I did a book cover illustration for most excellent SF author, Blog Star and General Nerd Luminary John Scalzi. Here it is!

He has rather brazenly - but as per usual with him, brilliantly - done a reboot of H. Beam Piper's classic "Fuzzy" universe stories with his new novel Fuzzy Nation.

Post with detailed set of process shots to follow soon!

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2010-03-15T11:28:00.001-07:00

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"9" Movie Game Art

2009-09-17T23:02:00.000-07:00

Everyone's heard by now of the new movie just out last weekend called "9," created and directed by Shane Acker and produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambatov. There was originally going to be a video game based on the movie (as most animated movies have these days), but unfortunately because the publisher of it went under, the partly-completed game was scrapped, almost a year ago.

You may remember that's about when I got laid off; it's not a coincidence. One of the projects I was working on was indeed the "9" movie game, and when it was cancelled there just wasn't enough work to keep us all on staff.

Now that the movie is out, here's a bunch of the work I did on it:

Character Designs

Lead concept artist Miguel Lleras created a creature called the "Beetle Betty," which would burrow into the ground headfirst and then pop up an explosive device, like the awful "bouncing betty" anti-personnel land mine. Based on his design, I had to come up with an "upgrade" to this beast the final of which is here with reference photos for various parts:

The first thing to figure out was what the upgraded bomb would be. I had some ideas for nasty fragmentation devices and also an electrical "lightning bolt" weapon:

Then I did some design sketches for the upgraded beast with the different bomb ideas attached:

They chose the electrical device and asked for a couple of specific options for the creature shape. From these two they chose the final design above:

We also needed an upgrade for a beast called the Rat Stalker, again with heavier weaponry and a different skull design than the original. I had a body design to work from, so first I tried a bunch of different small animal skulls:

Then I tried out a series of new weapons for it to carry:

They decided to go with drills and a ferret skull, which resulted in this final art:

All the characters in 9 are assembled from various small machine parts and random tools and bits of junk, so I found a lot of reference on the Internet for all the various bits. It was fun using them as puzzle pieces to build new monsters.

Lastly, we had a Hammer Beast which needed an upgrade. I started with new head designs:

And then again started messing with several different types of weapons:

Then it dawned on me that the obvious choice to upgrade hammers was hatchets!

At the same time I worked on some different front view designs to try to give it a distinctive silhouette:

After review, here's the final approved design, with lots of reference to help the modelers with the color and textures:

Environment Designs

The world of "9" is a post-apocalyptic urban warfare zone, basically a bombed out city based in a time period somewhere between WWI and WWII. One level design I worked on was an abandoned battle line trench with a destroyed tank sitting astride it:

The player would travel through the trench and then up over the top of the tank. They could see quite a bit of the surrounding area so it all had to be figured out. After climbing over the tank, the player would wind up back under it from the other side in this area, where they'd face the level boss. You can see the tank treads are the ceiling of the room:

The next environment is inside a church bell tower. The player would have to climb the inside of the tower - the characters are only 6-8 inches tall, but the buildings are human-sized - by negotiating various paths up the walls, and by activating catwalks in various spots. I sketched in some of the catwalk paths over the actual 3D model of the tower interior:

And here's an unfinished painting I was working on to help establish the lighting mood at the base of the tower:

The last environment I did was a full level design called the War Torn Street. These show all the areas the character would be moving through from start to finish. In most cases the character would be moving from left to right:

Exterior cafe:

Interior cafe:

Out the other side of the cafe (right to left from windowsill thru the car interior):

Over the car tops from left to right:

Through a large open area featuring a destroyed War Machine - in this level you play as the character shown here called "7," played by Jennifer Connelly in the film:

Over and through another car, then past an unexploded bomb (yikes!):

Through a winding path and another car:

Then to this arena area to face the level boss:

And once you beat him, down through the last smashed car into the dry sewer pipe that leads into the Cathedral:

I should mention that all this pencil-looking stuff was done using Painter IX's pencil brush tool, which is one of my favorite digital brushes. The graytones were all done with Digital Watercolor brushes.

Storyboards

These are really "action boards," just used to demonstrate various gameplay elements to show the publisher, designers, modelers and animators the kind of things the character is supposed to do.

They wanted the main character to be able to use his staff to wedge into some kinds of gateways, to do a kind of gymnastic bar vault move to get over places too wide to jump across:

A longer sequence showing many things 9 could do. First he finds himself in a dark place, so he turns on a light on his staff:

He sees he has to cross a chasm, but it's dark over there; he uses a kind of crossbow to fire a lit match to the other side to light the way:

And finally loads the crossbow with a fishhook and line so he can swing across:

This world that Shane Acker created is both fun to play around in and really spooky and strange. It's too bad the game couldn't be finished, I think the story and obviously the whole CG-made nature of the world actually lend itself well to be done in video game format - much more so than a lot of other movie games. This art was actually really enjoyable to work on and was a highlight of my time at that job, even though it was related to the end of it, heh...

I haven't seen the film yet, hopefully I can go this weekend. Apparently it's doing pretty well, surprisingly well! On the project I've been working on the last few weeks, I'm doing concept art and working with a very cool storyboard artist who did a lot of work on the 9 film, working directly with Shane Acker, named Régis Camargo. Check out his blog where he's just posted a bunch of the storyboards he did for the film! He's an excellent animator, too, and has done two short films all on his own... awesome.

Design Project: Military Hovercraft, Marker

2009-06-22T16:00:00.001-07:00

Here's the hovercraft done in a marker rendering:

Used Prismas and Copic markers over a copy made on my new printer - the inks don't smear when markered over, which is great. Hit it with a bunch of ProWhite for the splashes and highlights.

Spaceship Sketch

2009-06-15T01:06:00.000-07:00

Here's a spaceship thing I did for fun while at a meeting.

I draw a lot of spaceships.