How is video game art made

Italian artist Paolo Pedercini's project The Molleindustria introduces a call for re-articulating popular gaming culture as radical social action through a concept of Soft Industry, as a call to arms against contemporary entertainment industry.

Starting from , the artist has been presenting series of simple, yet authentic free online videogames for Mac, Windows and Linux, designed to tackle a specific social issue: Nova Alea , a game about cities and those who rule them, Oligarchy , on the dark issues of oil drilling, or The Free Culture Game which invites us to help defend freedom of knowledge in the age of copyright.

One particularly interesting form of video game art drove artists into a conceptual re-appropriation of already existing gamespace. Mods or modifications refer to visual and narrative changes inserted in games via patches, pieces of software usually created by programmers for the purpose of fixing or improving the game. In the context of video game art, these extensions allow players to enjoy different gameplay, whether by creating simple character skins or producing brand-new games by altering the code of the original.

These kinds of interventions were already a significant part of the gaming subculture, prominent in games like Half-Life , Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto. Through game modifications, artists found means not only for disseminating their ideas, but for using virtual environments to frame those ideas as well. The most famous artistic modification was a collective action by Anne-Marie Schleiner, Brody Condon and Joan Leandre, in a patch of popular first-shooter multi-player game Counter-Strike titled Velvet-Strike.

Formulated as a critique of George W. Eastwood - Real Time Strategy Group is one such collective, researching through games and playing with important issues of today.

Their series of total modification was in the turn-base strategy video game Civilization , a game universe which enables players to develop their own civilization through the ages. Their first patch, Civilization IV — Age of Empire was created in for the Dutch Electronic Art Festival which, alluding to another classic strategy Age of Empires , presents us with a present-day imperial battle of IT corporations dealing with new economy, different industries, surveillance, terrorism etc.

The second part of the trilogy, the Civilization V — Age of Love , foreshadows a battle for dominance of Web 2. In the abundant gaming world, artists have found significant inspiration for their interventions, but some of them saw these virtual spaces as a stage for their art, and its virtual inhabitants - their audience. Without the advanced technological savvy, many found online virtual worlds, MMOGs and MMORPGs like Second Life and World of Warcraft , undiscovered and unperturbed social spheres getting inquisitive about their norms and connections to the offline world.

By marrying performance art with video games, artists started creating site-specific online performances , introducing art to sometimes utterly unprepared worlds. DeLappe staged his work with idea of reaching an audience outside art world, but also solving the issue of isolation he felt in the Nevada desert. The virtual world which attracted performers the most has always been and remains Second Life Not exactly a videogame but a Multi User Virtual Environment MUVE , the platform provides its millions of residents a sort of virtual reality replica of everyday human life, and so presents a brand new stage for all kinds of artistic endeavors.

Second Life's art world is filled with galleries, exhibitions, live concerts and theater productions , just as its offline counterpart. An interesting form of artwork, which developed in online gamespaces, is machinima , a cinematic production of real-time staged gameplays, a sort of short animated films developed in the game universe.

However, it is also performance art which draws much attention in Second Life. Games are big business. Nowadays they're played by men, women, children, teenagers - everybody, basically. There is no better time to be a gamer, which should mean there's no better time to put your graphic design and illustration skills to work and become part of the ever-expanding games industry.

To give you an idea of how it all works and how you can become involved, I'll walk you through the basics of how original gaming art gets from sketchpad to screen Programs like Photoshop CS6 are used in a multitude of ways in the gaming industry. It could be visualising concepts in the early stages.

Or, if you are working on a real-time 3D game, then a 2D art package may be used create the texture maps that wrap around your model to give it colour and detail. Texture maps are usually created by manipulating photographic reference, or painted from scratch.

The industry standard is Photoshop but Gimp and Paint. Using triangles and polygons, complex forms can be created with relative ease once you know your way around the interface. This number will depend on the device you are making it for. This can happen either by keyframing , or for a more super realistic look, by importing motion capture data.

What I like to do is to get 3 shapes I like and then make a couple more just in case, because I may hit something good. Those serve me to get an idea which direction I would like to go with my further designs, sometimes some of the sketches inspire me more than others.

One of the problems with that approach is that the functionality of an object or vehicle or whatever you design, may dictate different shapes, e. After all, you are not designing real spaceships! So starting with a silhouette is a good approach at the beginning if you have no idea what you want to create.

Here are some examples of the spaceships I did for 30daychallenge and example how I did all of them:. The other way is when you have specific information from a client, for instance. It could be architectural style like art deco or something as silly as a leaf. It is also very important in that case to understand how a smithy works, what things define it as this specific place, e. It is difficult to create a well-balanced design that also looks awesome. I have to say it is something that I struggle with a lot, but I enjoy the process and challenge a lot!

One of my biggest inspirations is Ralph Mcquarrie. The designs he did almost 50 years ago still hold up to this day. Simply amazing.

I wish I could show you something from current project that I am working on. Unfortunately, it is still undisclosed. However to give you a glimpse of the process I will share something I am doing in my free time, after hours. Before I did basic 3D model, I did little research and planned what this tower was like before. Please note that it is not finished. At my work I am not required to do matte paintings, but I surely use a lot of photos to speed things up.

Apart from tons of ugly sketches, I help myself with 3D. At work I will use our game engine to block out 3D models for myself. Blocking out things in 3D not only shortens your time of drawing things out but also allows you to feel and see the scale of the objects. Once I am done with the 3D block-out, I am ready to sketch or paint over it.

If it comes to the overall mood when I create postcards the concept art you usually see online , I keep in my head the visual requirements for the project, what we have done so far, and I treat that kind of work just like an illustration. Thank god we use Photoshop because you can fix color, contrast and other things in 5 minutes! We work together almost on a daily basis. In a big and general shortcut, my drawings are used by the 3D artists and level designers.

Sometimes though, due to time pressure, some things may get lost and the concept needs some explaining.