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March 29, 2009
GDC 2009 Art Sessions
Having no actual artistic abilities myself, I rarely attend art sessions at GDC. As I mentioned in the last post, I pretty much confine myself to design sessions. But having attended a couple this year, I think I'll try to at least get to one each year in the future.
The Brütal Art of Brütal Legend
BEST OF SHOW
Double Fine Art Director Lee Petty gave an absolutely terrific talk about the development of three aspects of Brütal Legend's look -- its epic characters, epic skies, and epic terrain. He discussed some particular influences and inspirations for the game, such as heavy metal album covers and a specific artist (you'll have to look this one up, I'm not too up on my painters). From that, he addressed problems they encountered along the way with each of those areas and how they solved them. In a way, this was a fairly engineering-focused talk, if you consider (as I do) engineering to be a problem-solving discipline. Petty described how the characters' original look left them feeling detached from the world, in part due to low pixel density (and a lack of heft to their materials), and how they addressed that within the constraints they faced for the game -- simply throwing more textures at the problem wouldn't work, since they had the potential for far too many types of characters to be on-screen at any one time, so techniques like UV mirroring, low-frequency and high-frequency noise textures came in, with vertex coloring contributing blending information.
Petty spent a significant time describing their lighting models for time-of-day, and how that worked with characters. The big take-away for me in this area of the talk was that a simpler, if less realistic model, is a big win if it gives the artists better control and faster iteration. The original lighting model was highly complex, and difficult to control, and was scrapped in favor of better control for the artists. A sped-up time of day clip showed the results, and they were spectacular.
I won't go into any detail on the terrain issues -- primarily, they were interested in using a fairly simple height map, but addressing the lack of overhangs, and how to match models with the environment to make it closer to seamless.
This was definitely my favorite talk this year; although I'm a huge Double Fine fanboy, the game under discussion was just a bonus. What I specifically enjoyed was the application of craft to solve specific problems in the look of the game.
The Illustrative Rendering of Prince of Persia
This art talk actually straddled art and engineering in a slightly different way; rather than talking about how they solved problems with art, the presenters described the goal for the environments and the characters, and then separately discussed how different rendering techniques were used to achieve those goals. There were discussions of specific techniques (such as rendering characters' slightly bigger and only the back faces to achieve outlines), and providing bias information to artists to control when it was applied. A big take-away from both of these talks was to provide different lighting solutions for your characters, distinct from the environment.
When I'm back in Maryland, I'll be sure to finish this up with the technical talks I attended.
Posted by Brett Douville at March 29, 2009 01:28 PM
Comments
It's Lee Petty, not Perry. But I'm sure he's glad you liked the talk anyway :)
Posted by: N8 at August 4, 2009 08:02 AM
Fixed. I didn't have a program with me at the time. Thanks :)
Posted by: Brett Douville at August 4, 2009 08:02 AM