Blog for Eric Elwell at GarageGames.com

Game Lighting for whiners.

Eric Elwell — 2007-01-08T03:15:22+00:00

Basic Game Lighting Principles...

Due to a lack of spare time, I am unable to give a proper "what's up?"
post; but seriously, who cares? Useful information is much more worth
while, anyway. (also, an apology, the Mighty Fist posts are missing the
images. I will try to find them and re-upload.)

This is a tutorial ripped right out of my site. Some basic
stuff, but I think this may be useful to most if not all of you.

This is a GX Adam deGrandis original model, the texture is
covered in another tutorial (which I may or may not post in
subsequent plans. For now, find it on the site.)

The source of the problem:

Making of Mighty Fist (part 2)

Eric Elwell — 2006-04-20T01:00:20+00:00

Click to read Part 1

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

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

Making of Mighty Fist (part 1)

Eric Elwell — 2006-04-20T00:48:43+00:00

It all starts with an idea. For Mighty Fist, this idea consisted of running through a town full of thugs and beating them to the ground. (Really quite original, I know.) The process of bringing that idea to a playable game may be much simpler than you might have thought.

About a month prior to GDC we had a meeting to come up with ideas for a TGB demo project. When Joe suggested Mighty Fist, it was not much more than a thought. So what's the next logical step after a simple thought? Pixel shaders? Cutscenes? Lunch break? or is it just something that looks more like a simple doodle?

If you answered 'simple doodle' you were correct. (Answering 'lunch break' will be accepted as half credit.) This is one of the first of Joe's Mighty Fist doodles.

Working on Mighty Fist solidified in my mind that the doodling stage is extremely important. Doodling or thumbnailing is the first link in the bridge between an idea and a full blown art style. You can feel around for where you'd like to go with the project without spending too much time and with no expectation that it has to be some polished stellar art work.

I want to stress the importance of doodling. Good design is all about iteration. The more you iterate, the more the idea becomes refined. With doodling, you can iterate through 20 possible designs in the course of a meeting. You can share the iteration process immediately with others on the team. -joe

Prior to interning at GG, my art process could have been broken down to: 'Come up with an idea and go straight into production.' This mentality ended up with many failed attempts to create finalized polished art, because I lacked any sort of base doodling or refining iteration stages in my process. This was a lesson that I had learned, and for me, it was more a matter of swallowing my pride and not trying to make every sketch perfectly rendered and shaded. Ironically, making more entirely unimpressive doodles will help you refine the idea to a point that the final work will benefit from. I want to point this out, so that you will not downplay the importance of making quick cheesy drawings before attempting a finalized art style.

This sheet
shows some
of Joe's
doodles as
he was
explaining the
process for
refining the
look. You can
see how he
was explaining
iterations of
mouth
placement,
object scale,
and primitive
shapes for
body types.

The above doodle was me demonstrating to Eric the idea that if you stick to simple geometric shapes, you can distort them wildly, move important landmarks of the shape, and then share the proportional distribution between shapes to keep the art consistent between all assets. Again, this is quick doodling. I did these whilst sitting and talking to Eric, time spent, less than a minute. -joe

I continued the iteration of enemy characters from there and made a few doodles of my own.

(seriously, who better to pound to the ground than a thug with a wiffle-bat?)

Joe hooked me up with some sweet gear to start the animating process. The Video
LunchBox was a very useful tool in previewing my animations on paper. This is
the part were we bust out a ream of paper and assault it with a pencil.

We got this thing set up and I spent the next few weeks reading animation books
and drawing my first animation frames.

Notice the pack of pencils and ream of paper. I wasn't kidding, there's some
serious pen-paper warfare about to break loose.

Back in the day, when I was single and had a lot of free time (before I
had kids), I acquired a bunch of neat art toys. The toys include the video lunch
box (animation frame grabber), small portable color CCD camera (ebay).. a camera
stand, an animation table with an animation disc (that come with a long story
and a history of spending time at filmation and hanna barbera).. and an animation
paper punch. It was cool to get these things out of my back office and lend
them to Eric so he could learn to animate with the toys the big boys use. It
made for quite a scene in the weeks leading up to the GDC, as the office took
on the air of a big time art studio. - joe

Something that I've always found to be true with art, the more I do, the more
I realize that there is so much more to learn. This was the case with animation.
After my first few animations I went back to the books and sketched more study
sheets like these:

After about
two weeks of
reading,
sketching, playing
with my own
animations, and
refining the
characters, I was
a bit more
comfortable with
the process and
ready to start on
the animations
that would
hopefully make
it into game.

when sitting in meetings, I bring
my sketchbook to doodle. The above
doodle was me trying to solve the
problem of what to put in the
midground space. We wanted to
show off layering and parallax, so I
had to come up with stuff that would
be found between buildings in a city.
We came up with chain link fences
with parking lots, playgrounds, and
loading docks, and this would allow
us to have gaps between the
buildings and show off the
background. -joe

the above image shows off 3 views of two possible extremes of the color
scheme. I wanted to see how well the scene 'read' in full screen, in a 'mid'
configuration (the view that would be seen when someone was viewing the monitor
from a distance, say, walking by a booth at a trade show, and a small one for
a thumbnail that would be on a website to point people to the download. -joe

This was one of the most exciting parts of the project, as all the work that I had done to learn animation and the time that was seamingly wasted on unused animations finally brought forth fruit as all of the characters were animated in game if only in pen and ink:

Continue to Part 2

Give the people what they want

Eric Elwell — 2006-03-06T01:16:19+00:00

This plan has been in the back of my mind for some time now. A few months back I had posted a plan that, unfortunately, had gotten eaten. I thought that maybe I had gotten censored for my observations of the city of Eugene. Let's just say.. I've seen it rain chairs here. Although, I'm sure that censorship was not the case that time. First Item:

Launched my blog- www.thetextureguy.com check it out, it'll be good for you.

I can't say that I'm too much of a show off, but I really think that a good plan needs some 'bling' to make it worth the view (and not necessarily the read). Unfortunately, most of my work in the past few months is under NDA, but I'm going to leak this one anyway... so with no further delay, I give you:

The Cupid Battleship from Tribes 4

My plan for the near future is to get some Art related TDN articles up: I've posted some personal studies in the form of teasers (i guess) Tips and tricks for texture artists, which will cover a few quick and dirty ways of achieving a certain look or style. I've also been thinking about a general sketching/speed painting article, which will not be in the so near future, as I am still compiling my thoughts, and of course, always learning new things. I've learned enough since taking that video to spot some key mistakes, mostly having to do with my sketching technique, and form creation. Knowing that I've learned enough in the past few months to totally change my sketching style gives me a bit of fear about producing a tutorial in which I may teach some other poor technique; but as they say, you can only take someone as far as you have already come. That being said, hopefully these can help to take someone who is new to art.. one step farther in their development.

But on a more serious note... There's a very interesting story about this guy:

I won't lie, I'm fairly well known amongst the hardcore players in the online casual games space.
As it turns out, my internet moniker, "AdamdeGrandis123" , was the topic of discussion between a couple that had met through a Yahoo! Pool clan-match. Come to find out, they had gotten married and named their child, Adam deGrandis, in my honor. One day while Tim Aste was doing his usual Google search of my name, address, and online moniker, he came across the child, having confused him for yours truly. One quick call, and a deal was made: When the child came of age, he would be traded to GarageGames in exchange for a box of Krispy Creme donuts. At IGC I had the awesome opportunity to meet the man who was named (and subsequently hired) in my honor. It's a small world, people.