Industry, Breaking In

Quite often my biggest worry is leaving university and not being able to make a name for myself in the industry. It’s going to be hard work but i’m sure i’m capable, one thing however is that I am very fortunate that nowadays the games industry is represented alot better for studies and the teachers know alot more about what they are teaching than they used to!

There is also alot more information on professionals and how they broke into the industry, I found such a great list on EA’s website.

http://www.ea.com/news/breaking-into-the-industry-philip-simmons

Philip Simmons, Environment Artist is a guy i’ve looked at and is quite interesting. He shows me how I will likely be a freelance artists after my studies and that my sucess from there will be based on my skills and outsourcing my work. His biggest tip is good as well;

“The easiest way to become an Environment Artist is to be a World Builder. If you’re going through school, lots of schools will try to get you to be a Prop Artist, because props are the easiest things to turn around and make nice-looking. The problem with that is that most prop work gets outsourced. Companies need people who can make entire spaces. And to get those jobs, you have to show that you can realize an environment in its entirety, concept it, build it, and handle it – all by yourself.”

Online Gaming and Internet

I recently read an article on develop magazine (http://www.develop-online.net/news/40574/EA-All-franchises-to-recieve-online-universes) that EA are planning to make all thier games require an internet connection, basically be an online universe. While I can see this happening I can see a massive drop in sales and probably about as much hate as the DRM. The problem with this theroy being it requires the player to 1. Have a good internet 2. have it up 24/7. Issues occur when internet cuts happen or a company goes down for a short period, the gamer thus loses the ability to play his games he bought. I persoanlly beleive this is a way for EA to combat piracy as often with an online game compared to a single player game, it is easier for EA to find pirated signitures etc. Neverthless its a pain in the ass for consumers.

“Creating Guildwars2 Cinematics”

“They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so we’re letting our art do the talking with our new 2.5D animated storybook cinematics.

A strong narrative has always been important in Guild Wars, and cinematics are one of the many tools we use to present the story in a dynamic way. In Guild Wars 2, we’ve reinvented the way we use cinematics to tell the story. We utilize proprietary animation software that renders 2D cinematics in real time, so your player will appear inside the brilliant animated illustrations.

In this video, we’ll take a look at the artistic process for creating the stylized new look, and we’ll check out a section of the GW2 human race cinematic, which players will see in the gamescom demo. I hope you like what you see!” – http://www.arena.net/blog/video-creating-guild-wars-2-cinematics

Just an interesting video I watched that shows a basic understanding of how the put together the concept art to create a cinematic. It shows a quick look at thier storyboards and its just generally interesting to see the transitions from scene to scene in the final thing.

Cinematics using 2D Images

This is an interesting topic for me as I have only seen these type of cinematics being released lately. I don’t know why we havent seen more examples from games, for me they are entertaining and show story well, they are also easier to make if you recycle the concept art that has been designed for the game/film.

Here is an example of Blizzards new Diablo 3 intro cinematic, as you can see it uses 2D images to create 3D effects and uses fast transitions to keep a fast paced battle.

A still shot taken from the Diablo cinematic shows how the pictures don’t have to be breathtakingly stunning, just to clearly show the detail of the object.

Heres another example of a cinematic using art work from ArenaNet’s upcoming Guildwars2. The art for these are more beautiful mainly because they are recycled from the actual artwork for the game and not produced for the cinematic, this I find much more exciting.