Art Tools and Techniques

My round tables were attended mainly by artists and art directors. Areas discussed were:

The talks went best if many people shared a common platform, if they didn't, they had little to say to each other. However, if someone brought up a limitation of their platform, someone else would explain how another platform could solve the problem. Some expressed dismay at the cost of the high-end 3D art solutions like Silicon Graphics hardware and Alias or Softimage software. I had to conciously guide the talk to cover 2D art and well as 3D. 3D was by far the most common work discussed.

Polygon vs Spline modelling seemed to be decided more by the platform used than by concious choice. The attitude was "Whatever gets the job done.", although a few people were excited by the possibilities presented by spline modelling and animation.

Low Poly modelling seemed split on whether to model a low poly object directly, or model a high resolution mesh and optimize it down to a useful polygon count.

Motion Capture was eyed suspiciously by animators, who hated having to work the data into a usable form. Some thought animating from scratch was faster and better than tweaking Motion Capture data, but admitted that Motion Capture did lend animation a startling realism. Proceedural animation solutions like Character Studio or the use of Expressions was eagerly anticipated, though some wanted more direct anmation control than Proceedural animation would allow. Several Character Studio tips were exchanged.

Dispite the emergence of sophisticated paint programs like Fractal Design's Painter and Photoshop, and the introduction of 16-bit game art, it seemed that the old standby DeluxePaint was a favorite of many. The feeling seemed to be that this 10 year old piece of software was still the premiere tool for game artists. Many wanted a Windows version of DeluxePaint. A few folks were using 3D paint programs to texture 3D models, and texture map creation seemed to be what most 2D paint programs were relegated to.

Almost everyone enjoyed their software having some sort of Plug-in capability, and many tips on which plug-ins to get were exchanged. Some artists were amazed when they discovered that at some game companies, programmers write plug-ins for the artists. I know I was amazed.

There seemed a balance of artists that could import art into the game by themselves, and those who had to hand their art over to the programmers and cross their fingers that the programmers would import it correctly. Some dismay was expressed at the time it took between the creation of art, and the ability to see it in the game. This was especially important to the console game artists, who needed to see the art on a TV screen, rather than a high resolution monitor.

Many expressed dismay at the amount of storage needed for high quality animations. There was brief discussions of compression software and hardware, as well as techniques the programmers used to squeeze the art data into the smallest space possible. There seemed to be heavy use of Zip and Jaz drives, as well as simply grabbing more server space.

The first talk I ran had an abundance of 3D Studio Max users, and was thus lively and informative, as nearly everyone had a common platform to discuss. My last talk consisted of a group with almost no platform overlap, and it was a real struggle to find common areas to discuss. We ended up talking mainly in generalities. If I was to do this again, I would suggest a narrowing of focus to a specific Hardware or Software platform, that way everyone would share a common ground and be able to share their problems and solutions without feeling that what they're saying is useless to a portion of their audience.

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