Fundamentals of Concept Art Process - MAGES Institute

BASIC GUIDE

CONCEPT ART PROCESS Overview The basic 5 Step Guide to creating your own Concept Art

Introduction

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Concept art in essence, visually depicts an idea, mood or design that is used across media including films, video games or architecture.

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It influences and gives direction to the entire project, and is vital for all creative endeavours.

What Problems does it solve?

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By giving a visual form to a concept which doesn’t exist yet, Concept Art informs the entire production process from the start.

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By design, this process attempts to eliminate wastage of resources and efforts.

Process 1. Idea Generation The scope and objective of the project is defined, for example a video game is being made with multiplayer competitive elements in a sci-fi military setting.

2. Research References are gathered from any applicable currently-existing art available. In the example, All Sci-Fi military shooter games will be examined and their art collated for reference

Process 3. Concept Sketching Rough sketches of the concept are made keeping in mind the unique identity of the project. For example the world-building elements are incorporated into the visual and design elements. In our example, what will the buildings look like, where will the gameplay take place? What monsters will the players fight?

4. Refinement Sketches are then refined, shortlisted, and iterated upon until a set of variants are made for the client to pick from.

Process 5. Detailing In the next steps, the shortlisted and “finalised” idea for the specific portion of the concept art is detailed (for example, adding texture, lighting and other details).

For example, the tanks and other military equipment are given more detail to ground them in the world. These details serve the main objective of the project.

Process 6. Iteration and Finalisation Concept Art is a collaborative process which requires a healthy degree of back-and-forth between the artist and the client, as by its very nature it takes feelings and concepts and converts them into a visual form which can be shared and understood by others.

Concept Art in Games Concept Art defines the look and feel, objects, props, characters, etc in the visual aspect.

Approved concept art is then taken over by production departments in studios to create the 3D assets that have been made by concept artists – ie the visual form is then “brought to life” inside a game engine by 3D Artists or Game Artists.

Software used 1.

Concept Art creation includes a heavy use of Adobe Photoshop as it involves 2D illustration done via Layers.

2. Modern Concept Art techniques also involve

using 3D rendering – wherein artists create the objects and environments etc in 3D, place and light them in a 3D rendering engine like Blender.

3. Apart from staple tools, Artists generally use

Pureref for reference collection and review, and various asset libraries such as Quixel.

Some Examples..

Some Examples..

Some Examples..

Some Examples..

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