Jump to content
  • entries
    945
  • comments
    4,956
  • views
    1,220,852

Using 3D for reference


Nathan Strum

2,354 views

It's been awhile since I posted a "making of" for label artwork. Mainly because there hasn't been anything released in quite awhile, so there hasn't been anything to share. (There are a couple of labels I've been working on, but until those games are released, the art will have to stay under wraps.) However, since the Lead contest just wrapped up, I can show some of the steps in making one of the illustrations I did for that.

 

Originally, my concept was to have a group of alien pilots standing in a spaceship hangar, all looking at you (the gamer), basically challenging you to lead them. The sketch, which I threw together in Painter, was really rough, and showed the pilots reflected in your helmet's visor:

lead-concept.jpg

 

I wanted the aliens to all have a different appearance - color, shape, etc., so it was obvious they were from different planets (hence all the different ships in the game), but I still wanted there to be some common element tying them all in together. At the time, I figured it would be helmets with big, dark faceplates. But even though that element remained, I'd come up with something else, later.

 

To start drawing them I wanted some reference. I knew I'd have a short, cartoony guy in there (which is familiar territory), but the rest I wanted to have more realistic (for aliens??) proportions. So I turned to Poser. Now, Poser is both a good tool, and just a really creepy program. It allows you to pose and render über-realistic humans. It also comes with a few other models (like the cartoony guy shown below), and you can download additional models (like the anime girl shown below, which I initially got for reference for the RPS label). If used right, it can be a handy starting point for artwork that doesn't look like you used a 3D program. But most of the time, people seem to just use it to render rather dubious, photo-realistic pictures of women. (This falls under the whole "move out of your parents' basement already" category.)

 

But I digress.

 

This is what I used for my reference:

lead-pilots-render.jpg

 

Kind of ugly, isn't it? The tall guy is stretched really weird, the lighting is bad, and it really doesn't look like much. But what it gets me, is proportion and perspective. Placement of feet, foreshortening, relative heights, etc. It allowed me to figure out what poses I wanted, proportions of the characters, placement of the camera, and adjust it quickly and accurately.

 

Instead of attempting to model costumes, helmets and props, then try and render it all as 3D objects, I just printed the above render out, slapped a piece of paper over it, and started drawing. This allowed me to tweak proportions, and freely add or change whatever I wanted. I could also make the tall and short guys look a lot more alien. Best of all - it completely lost its roots in a 3D program, and looks like it was just drawn:

lead-pilots-scan.jpg

 

After this, I realized that my original concept of them being reflected in the helmet just wasn't going to work. The detail would get all lost, and I ran a big risk of people not "getting it". And logically, it doesn't make any sense, since if you're the pilot, how are you looking into the reflection on the outside of your own helmet?

 

Also at this point, I decided to stick with just the four pilots. I made several attempts to try and stick a floating robot in there, but everything just ended up looking like I swiped it out of Wall-E, so I gave that up.

 

Next, I needed to do something to establish that this was all taking place in a spaceship hangar. Dave Dries suggested having a ship in the hangar practically right on top of them. That sounded like a good idea, so I started building a ship in 3D:

lead-ship-model.jpg

 

This was hacked together in Carrara, another 3D program. Even though it's "possible" to move models between Poser and Carrara, I really didn't need the models in the same program. I just needed to position the ship in such a way that it looked like the pilots were standing in front of it when everything was put together. So I printed out a copy of the pilot line art, and taped it to my monitor. This allowed me to see through it enough to position the ship behind it, and line things up. Sort of like this:

lead-ship-render.jpg

 

When I got the ship positioned, I did a quick render of it, and printed that out. Then I threw a sheet of paper on top of that, and re-drew the ship:

lead-ship-sketch.jpg

 

Another drawing on top of that resulted in the hangar (based on the grid lines in the 3D render):

lead-hangar-sketch.jpg

 

When composited together, the rough sketches looked like this:

lead-hangar-comp-pencil.jpg

 

After that, I went in and cleaned up all the lines in FreeHand, as I'd done elsewhere:

lead-final-line-art.jpg

 

Everything is separated onto individual layers, to make it easier to paint. I still use the basic techniques shown in my Photoshop tutorials from a few years ago, although I should update those, since I've learned some new tricks since then.

 

While painting them, I figured out that other element needed to tie them together: their costumes would all be made of the same shiny black material, with color accents. The black ended up looking kind of rubbery, which was fine, and allowed me to make it look like the tall guy's spacesuit could expand or contract, as if he had some really weird alien physiology under all that hardware. Plus it looked really good on the female pilot. ;)

 

The overall color of the hangar was a leftover from the 3D ship render. That just happened to be the default background color in Carrara, and I liked it enough to keep it.

 

This is the final art, prior to being cropped:

lead-final-art.jpg

 

Note that the edges are unfinished. Even so, I ended up making this much wider than it really needed to be, since the emphasis was always supposed to be on the pilots. But I tend to get carried away with this stuff. (And I justified it to myself by reasoning that if it had won the contest, I could re-use the larger art for the manual. Oh well... ;))

 

I further modified this by adding some additional layers to make a "backlit" version, as seen in some of the contest entries I submitted. But it's still basically the same illustration.

2 Comments


Recommended Comments

My favorite, of all the Lead labels, was your entry #15.

Thanks! Maybe I'll break down that one in a blog entry, too. Although with that one, the process was much less involved (no 3D).

Link to comment
Guest
Add a comment...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...