Making of Mighty Fist (part 2)
by Eric Elwell · 04/20/2006 (1:00 am) · 26 comments
Part 2Click to read Part 1
- Joe and I discussed what type of world objects we would need and how we planned
to implement them. Joe made more doodles. It was great.
more doodling. All of the above images were me throwing out ideas for quick to make shapes, and was to re-use assets (windows being the focus of some of
the drawings). The final drawing I actually drew in one of the executive planning
meetings that happens every week. An old trick I learned from a very experienced
Art Director named Shawn Sharp; If there are more than two people at a meeting,
bring a sketchbook, as it will probably be the only time you get to draw during
the day. -joe
After a bit of doodling, Joe had me put together a list of art assets we would
need for the project. (Aside from displaying my poor handwriting, the reason
for this image is the sketch at the bottom.)
Joe talked with Mark B and Lance Bass about hand drawing the art assets for
the game. Mark did some super cool drawings in his oh-so-clean style:
Lance did some awesome line work for the world objects. The original scans
were very large which made them very easy to work with in photoshop, and required
little to no cleanup.
Lance's work was a huge boost for me. Not only did it save me the time of drawing
each piece myself, but it motivated me to work faster on the painting process
just so I could see these great pieces in game.
I set out a fairly rigid process for myself using photoshop actions and predefined color swatches. This helped to unify the look, greatly increase workflow, and allow for color tweaking later on. I will talk
more about photoshop actions and my workflow in subsequent blogs.
Joe drew the background and midground layers and created the groovy background layer for the use in the game:
even more meeting doodling. All this doodling allowed me to get a clear focus on the style and come up with the final image for the background in pretty
short order. The final silhouette took less than an hour to produce from concept
to completion. -joe
Now that we had characters running around and interacting in pen and ink, and painted world objects; the final step was to paint the animated characters. This was not an incredibly difficult stage, thought it was very long and tedious with a total of 82 painted frames. This was a great experience for me in that I had to learn how to keep my character frames consistent with each other. I found myself taking time before painting an animation set to plan for the best/quickest process before painting each frame. I also found myself going slightly nutty, so I took frequent breaks to rest my brain, and rest assured, my brain was 100% inactive during these breaks
- It was well worth the work to finally see these characters animated in color.
The great thing about interning at GarageGames is that you actually get to work on projects and learn
the trade. Less of fetching for coffee and more of making cool stuff. I am very happy with the
development of my abilities over the past 6 months. Looking back at my artistic ability before interning
here, my workflow was slow and clumsy. I had previously worked almost purely in digital media. I was
skipping a lot of key steps in the artistic process. Drawing in freehand was something that I rarely
attempted, yet Joe pushed me to do more and more of it. Now physical media is my preference for a
starting point, and my final work is much more refined because of it. My work on Mighty Fist forced me
to draw a lot. Drawing more improved my ability and working speed in animation; and animating
improved my drawing ability in many more areas: from initial design to silhouette to iteration to flow to
stroke economy and much more. It has been a personal goal of mine to be always learning and
advancing my skills; there really is no end to that. It is also a joy of mine to share that with others and
help them in their artistic development. I do hope that you've enjoyed the read and imagery; but more
importantly I hope that you've grasped the concepts of how you can approach your work, increase
productivity, and improve your workflow.
To sum it up for you, when you make your project with TGB, remember to burn through a stack of
paper just for doodling. It keeps it focused, and it keeps it fun.
About the author
#23
04/22/2006 (10:32 am)
Eric, your work is so good. You should do more work.
#24
11/17/2006 (12:50 pm)
All images gone.. are they going to be back? 
#25
01/03/2008 (10:03 am)
This is the best tutorial I've seen. From concept to creation. I'd love to see more on this. Tlighting one is beautiful as well. Thanks so much for sharing!!!!
#26
02/05/2008 (1:06 pm)
Any news on the release date?!
Torque Owner Eric Elwell
Raxx: That's a great suggestion for most digital artists. My personal preference is Open Canvas. Pascal Bos and I make sure to do OC sessions atleast once or twice a week. I usually post my sessions on my site (www.thetextureguy.com) as well as a download link for OpenCanvas, if you're interested. It's a ton of fun and very inspiring to work with other artists.
Nauris: The total count for ingame art assets is 82 animation frames, and 52 world objects (including background, cityscape layers, etc.) Production time was 3 weeks long with an additonal week of concepting and meeting over various ideas. As far as working digitally, I am fairly comfortable with a tablet, but I tend to approach digital work with a different mindset and workflow. Digital media has the benefit of "undo" but I don't find it to be as quick as physical media. I've found freehand work to be much faster and easier to iterate.
Adam: Hi
Mark: Hi