Digitial Painting Use in the Gaming Industry
We introduced in our previous post, Concept art vs. Illustration, that various jobs exist for artists in the entertainment industry. We went through these two most important positions at our studio, and today we will talk about other creative tasks that you can find in gaming or movie industries. Each one plays a part in a bigger picture, so let’s see how they are useful and become every year more significant.
At the beginning of video game history, we had to be creative in writing code! At that time, programmers didn’t have the possibility to build super-advanced games, not having the technology necessary to create and store long code. One person oversaw programming, game design and all the other positions that exist today. Esthetics achievement came later when software and hardware evolved, and since then gaming industry doesn’t stop growing. Offering new horizons, visual part got more important in the process and businesses started to need specialized artists in their teams. Digital painting improves following the same dynamic and is more and more linked to this field. Big developing companies outsource a part of their work to studios like ours.
When an idea of game is developed, teams need concept art to get a clearer vision and keep on working. It concerns environments, characters, as already mentioned, but also props, vehicles or creatures. Mood paintings can also be created to accompany all the teams in the same visual direction. Game art is the drawing or painting of elements at all stages in its creation. It includes concept art, as well as assets placed in-game, backgrounds, loading screens, buttons design... Key art comes later in the production, it is a high-quality image meant to appear on all promotional medium like posters or boxes. It shows crucial moments from the game. Nowadays the competition is pitiless between publishers. Games need more powerful technology to create always higher-quality art down to the smallest details in-game. Consoles developers need to push their researches to stay on course, like all other contributors in this industry.
Games can have trailers and for these, artists draw storyboards, quick sketches showing all shots of the video with the right angle and main elements that will appear. After that, artists can also be asked to paint the illustrations depicted in the storyboard. They will be animated one after another to become a video as you can see in the project Chivalry 2 and Total War Amazons. Talking about movies, artists can also create storyboards following the same principle described above. There will be more shots and filming will replace the animation of 2D illustrations.
Digital painting in movies or video games is used to broadcast a story through 2D images either as inspiration during the production process or as a final image. Other arts, like music, become more and more important in video games creation. Some recent games are criticized, because they put so much effort in the scenario, the characters played by actors, a photorealistic universe… that we watch them more than we play. It is also interesting to see where the evolution of technology will bring gaming and artists working on it in the following post.