Contact us anytime to know more — Abhishek P., Founder & CFO CISIN
Most of the people will give answer all, few will say character they like, few the amazing scenes, UI, graphics.
Yeah, that is the common answers we can get from peoples who love to play games.
Why they love to play games and sometimes why they addicted to playing games.
The reason is the concept behind the game. That concept is so powerful that can make you crazy for the game.
Everything you see in any desktop or mobile game is designed by the following artist:
Drawing artist, digital painter, modular, texturing artist, rigger, animator etc.
They design any sort of art like Human characters, creature, zombie, environment, buildings, road, vehicles, etc.
But who gave them the idea that what needs to be designed and how it will look once you make the final output, that is the most important part before anyone dig into the design phase.
From here the concept art begins. Let us have a look at the Concept Art.
Concept art, as the name implies, it is the combination of art and concept.
The art based on a concept, or a concept which is shown be some art.
So basically it sounds two basic skills: Imagination require to describe the concept and drawing requires to give the visual idea of that concept.
So the concept art is the most appealing careers option for those who want to begin their career for 2d/3d games, advertisement, movies and any sort of digital entertainment work.
When storyboard setup than concept artist starts work on it.
He creates a scene based on a given storyboard and provides all necessary input to digital artist.
A good concept art gives the viewer a clear idea of how the thing would look when it will produce in reel to real.
Concept art can vary from landscape to Fantasy, from human to creatures, to any complex scene with or without normal or any existing or non-existing characters.
The world which we have seen can look very different from the creative eye, the imagination can take you to the unknown and different world.
So the visualizing entire worlds into creative eyes take a lot of practice and at the same time requires imagination skill.
The concept artists need to think like the way they are living in that fantasy world, they need to use their knowledge to create a scene, they need to think what kind of environment, objects, and characters could exist within their fantasy world.
How they move, how they look, their skin color, body textures, hair, fur etc.
The drawing artist, digital painter plays an important role during the process of concept art. If concept artist does not have any drawing skills than they help him to shape the idea into reality.
Although the concept artist must have these basic skills as it helps to describe by their own more correctly rather than by means of help by some other hands.
Let us take a simple example of a scene of a game where we need to design a coffee shop in a park.
The basic concept art would be a coffee shop situated in a park with coffee machine and a man.
A bench next to the coffee shop to sit, park environment with green grass ground, some bushes and few trees, few lighting poles.
Version 01: The above drawing shows the basic concept art of a coffee shop in a park.
Digital artist than create a digital version of above drawing and design next improved version by spending a couple of hrs, which can be sent to the art manager for further approval before move to the final version.
Save Time, Save Cost….Yup...Have a Coffee than ;)
Version 02: Semi-Finished digital drawing.
So you can see that the concept art makes work easy of a digital painter, now he needs to follow the details provided by a concept artist and accordingly play with colors to give a nice detailed scene on which the further action will depend.
Version 03: The above drawing shows a final digital version of the said concept art of a coffee shop on a park.
This is how you can get from a rough drawing to final interesting output. Looks Good Enough… :)
That is the magic of concept art which in returns not only save the time but also give a positive impact on the working team and of course client.
Further, we can say that a concept art is a technique to develop your ideas faster. As a professional concept artist, you need to think an in-depth analysis of what is going to be produced and highlights the idea you want to generate to save time and cost.
You need to think how to keep scene dramatic enough relevant before moving onto the final stage.
Using a concept art you can save time by removing irrelevant or unrelated over thinking.
Let us take an another example of a fantasy scene of the 2d game.
The storyboard of the scene is:
The user needs to see the dark fantasy forest environment, a creature with the egg in the nest and a human character with a magic staff in his hand, So based on the storyboard of the scene below will be the concept artist approach:
As we need to create an fantasy scene so the secret to design fantasy landscapes is composting and a depth of visualization.
As designing a environment landscape is a bit challenging job, so the more you imagine the better you design. So defining the shapes of long dark trees, few dead trees, the creature with longs legs like a spider with golden glowing eyes pointing toward the human character in the centre of that scene, a character with magic staff in one of his hand, some light will give the scene a life.
The above is the final rendered scene.
To make each section of the scene outstanding, the scene must be finished with extra detailing.
That might be an easy to follow and a perfect reference process if you explained your idea correctly.
This process teaches you how to get the right perspective view from any concept.
The most challenging aspects of any landscape design is to keep your idea as per the real world while still imagine and designing something unique based on the requirement and concept art.
Once we finished the digital artwork than we send it to the art director who approves the design.
If there will be any call for any changes in those paintings than it will be updated accordingly.
Once the scene is finalized after those revisions than it will be used as a reference for everyone working as a character modular, texture artist, rigger, animator, lighting expert for making a final product.
So the concept artists repeat this process for every Human characters, creature, zombie, environment, buildings, road, vehicles, etc.
or we can say for everything you see in a game to looks amazing.
That approach is enough to design the base drawing.
Conclusion:
A good concept art is that one which is combined and used for the end goal of imagining creative ideas visually.
The fundamental process is based on the creativity and attention to detail that allows them to shape any kind of characters, creatures, landscape required for final production.
That is why we said concept art is the secret behind any successful game as it is such a detailed process which definitely ends with a shape of a fine output.
