Yay! I got some works in progress files from Frits on the characters. I’ll be sure to update these as well when they reach a polished state!

These are character designs for some of the guys the player get to control.

Hey everyone! Here’s a Hogworld concept art piece I finished up today and wanted to show. It’s for the dock/city scene I did the steps for a little while back. This thing is going into the foreground to add some more depth to the scene and hopefully a little pizazz to it. I had a lot of fun working this one up and juxtaposing the old/new ship designs!

Hope you guys dig! Be sure to click the image for a larger version.

dCepT

Hey everyone! We wanted to share a little of our process with everyone. I’m going to try to walk you through how we build a scene for our Hogworld project from the concept art stage to the final built scene in Unity. First up: concept art.

Word of warning: lengthy post ahead! But don’t worry, there are lots of pictures as well!

Concept Art

Frits and me usually start out discussing what we want out of a specific scene and try to gather relevant reference material before jumping into thumbnailing and sketching.

I usually do a rough sketch and then add a new layer over it and clean it up, then I add another layer beneath the clean lines and start adding flat colors.

Not jumping in and shading stuff right away helps me think in stages rather than going in there and doing it all in one pass. Sometimes I just go for it, but these concept art pieces will be used pretty directly in the scene so I try to streamline the process for what we’ll be doing with it further into the pipeline. I used to (oh, who am I kidding, I still do) suck at layer control in Photoshop, but working on this project has helped me get a little more into it.

After the flat colors were done, we decided to extend the scene. Luckily this scene is viewed straight from the front so an extension is easy. We wanted to use parallax scrolling and a little 3D to give off the depth later on, so it was just a matter of extending the canvas and painting in new buildings.

After this I went in and used some custom texture brushes to add more grit and feeling to the piece, as well as moving a little around on some elements. My brush set can be downloaded here for those interested.

The story also called for a evening/night version of this piece and we decided that a further extension of the scene was needed so I used the same process for the new buildings on the right from sketch through cleanup to flat colors and textures. The night light effects were achieved primarily through some multiply and overlay layers with dark browns/oranges.

Here is the result of the night and light adjustments:

Everything is still separated in layers and masked out so it’ll be easy to chop it up later for textures and such.

Next post will be about how we turned this concept piece into a texture atlas that the 3D guys use to generate the meshes we use and a few words on the 3D conversion of the artwork.

Hey guys! We’re working on a project called “Hogworld” these days, and we wanted to give you a little teaser. This awesome little guy is called “Flagger” and was designed by our AD Fridtjof Olsen and modelled, textured and rigged by 3D artist Hans Kristian Andersen.

Click the pictures for larger versions and enjoy!