Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
I bought a tablet at one point, but not being able to look and draw in the same place was making me insane. If I did art for a living I would buy a tablet computer where you draw on the screen, but I don't have the money to spare.

It does take a while to get used to that disconnect. Ironically, some other people complain about the Cintiq that their hand is in the way! [smile]

I found practice helped, but some people really just can't get over it. There's a small Cintiq, but even that costs $999 - cheaper to just buy a tablet PC. (Heck, I'd buy a tablet PC if it ran OS X. I've made my investments in my workflow, and I'm not willing to tamper with it now.)

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow

Quote: Original post by Oluseyi

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
And specific to your example, when you are talking about (concept) designing GUIs, Photoshop is pretty inappropriate for that because it is a program for doing illustration (finished, elaborate, perfect in every detail, and SLOW).

I disagree with this assertion.

While pencils, paper, markers (or some other kind of wash) and possibly white out are the fastest means of developing a concept for communication with others, this does not mean Photoshop is inappropriate for the same purposes. In fact, Photoshop, properly used, is a tremendous asset even in the concept development phase. One of the books I recently purchased, Color Drawing by Michael E. Doyle, significantly revised its contents to incorporate the use of digital tools into its workflows. It targets architects, and one of its common approaches is to scan in line drawings, manipulate them in Photoshop, then plot the image and put finishing touches again by hand.

Hmm. I have years of experience using photoshop and find it quite slow, and have regularly heard other people say a piece done in photoshop took them anywhere for 8 to 40 hours (that's for final stuff not rough concepts), but I can see how line drawings of architecture would be particularly quick and easy to throw some color on, and also I've heard people talk about speedpainting which is practicing techniques for very quickly producing impressive pieces in photoshop or painter.

I probably also should have added that if one has a tablet and gets good at using it that would also make drawing directly in photoshop or similar a lot faster.

As someone who uses photoshop professionally I would have to say that for rapidly prototyping a GUI concept photoshop is the best tool you could use. It has advance aligning features, vector as well as raster options and a variety of other attributes that make it ideal. Personally, I couldn't really imagine a person using a non-digital method of prototyping a digital-exclusive user interface.


To the other questions:
1) I want to extend my knowledge in what graphics designers and graphics artists do, how it works, the process, time, etc. as I see this is valuable knowledge to a game designer (not a game designer in the graphical sense).

Here you can visit www.cgtalk.com, visit the games section and investigate pipelines, these will give you a good estimate of time taken, steps taken and methods used. Pipelines these days can be drastically diffrent from older published information because of the heavy use of mudbox and/or zbrush (digital sculpting programs)

2) I want to be able to create more simple graphics both for conceptual/demonstration purposes and for implementation in my own future projects.

This depends on what you want to do.

for a very basic 2d game you can just use MS paint, for a more graphically advanced game get yourself a version of photoshop, not very expensive if you are a student. If you want to do 3d I will suggest buying silo2.0, its the cheepest solution, its also the easiest to learn and has an advenced set of features including texturing and digital scultping for organic modeling.

* GUI design. I have a feeling Photoshop may come in handy here, but generally creating the looks of menu screens, dialogue boxes, flashing text, etc..

Photoshop is the best bet. It has the added benefit of being an industry standard, so learning it is bassically required.

* Cartoon-esque graphics. This includes both cartoon-like models and creating cartoon-like environments. I suppose it's similar to sprites, except they're not sprites and are not sprited. Information about the animation process is also welcome.

again photoshop, you will also need an understanding of illustrater, which as SNS mentioned is a vector program, it just depends on the style and the intergration into you pipeline.

* 2d/3D polygon models - This is basically just 3D models made up in whatever way, but used in 2D games.

Easiest here is silo2.0 but there is a learners version of 3ds max as well as maya, although they are overkill they have more advanced animation features then most other things and also have the added benefit of being as close to an industry standard as you can get, although be warned that things vary wildly these days as far as what software companies prefer you use.


Fire away, I guess. I'm completely new to visual arts and graphics design in game development so I have NO idea where to begin. Even if your suggestions do not apply to any of the three above-mentioned traits, it would be nice to have some sort of starting point. Primarily, it's to give me an understanding of visual arts as well as giving me the opportunity to work with 2D graphics since I'm mostly interested in 2D games.

Start with the basics. Learn to draw freehand on paper. This is a skill you will take with you to any artistic medium you choose and is the basis upon which all further learning you will do.

First of all, I'd like to thank you all for being so helpful - much more than I had hoped for.

I've seen plenty of suggestions here of many different types of software, and it's going to be great to keep in handy for future reference and use, but at this point I don't feel it would be a good idea to put out a lot of money on the professional program, especially when considering that I am not a student can't get student prices for some software, such as Adobe software.

So I'e been looking about for a place to start, as I mentioned, and I feel that this would be a good place to start:

* Download Inkscape (there's my vector graphics editor)
* Buy Silo (it's far cheaper than, say, Maya or 3ds Max)
* Buy Adobe Photoshop
* Buy a Wacom Intuos3 (from what I could gather, this was the best option without being too pricey)

I'm not going to start off right away but this gives me a good sense of where to start and what to get once I do get on it (don't have enough money just yet :P). Does this sound like a good starting point?


PS: I draw from time to time, though notoften these days. I'm relatively good at it, though I might want to start looking at tutorials, hehe.

Photoshop is also expensive, but not nearly as expensive as the 3D packages mentioned.

I recommend using Gimp to get you started, and get Photoshop (as well as the entire Adobe suite) when/if you get professional work.

For 3D work, do try Blender first. It has a somewhat obscure user interface (I've only got used to it after using the program for several years) but if you don't let that distract you, it is a very powerful modeling, animation, rendering and post-processing package that rivals the commercial programs in many areas. Also, you can't beat the price :)

InkScape is a very good choice, but again, you will want to switch to Illustrator later if you do professional 2d vector work.

Intuos (or any Wacom tablet) is a wise purchase for graphics artist of any caliber.

Quote: Original post by Metallon
* Download Inkscape (there's my vector graphics editor)
* Buy Silo (it's far cheaper than, say, Maya or 3ds Max)
* Buy Adobe Photoshop
* Buy a Wacom Intuos3 (from what I could gather, this was the best option without being too pricey)

I'm not going to start off right away but this gives me a good sense of where to start and what to get once I do get on it (don't have enough money just yet :P). Does this sound like a good starting point?

Yes, it's good. As Nik02 mentioned, you can substitute GIMP for Photoshop and Blender for Silo, at least to try, to lower your costs, and then spring for the professional tools once you get some work or become more deeply invested.

Quote: PS: I draw from time to time, though notoften these days. I'm relatively good at it, though I might want to start looking at tutorials, hehe.

Yeah. Drawing is kind of a critical skills, here! [smile]

Quote: Original post by Metallon
Information about the animation process is also welcome.

I think this has been overshadowed a bit. I'm a 2D guy, so I'm going to cover the 2D animation process.

The fundamental process in making things move is to show a sequence of images, each slightly different from the previous, over time. If the images are show rapidly enough, a quirk of the human eye known as persistence of vision kicks in, and the distinct images blend together to appear to be a single object, moving fluidly.

There are two primary digital approaches to achieving animation. The first, cel-based animation or sprite animation, is based on traditional paper techniques (the name "cel-based" is derived from the celluloid sheets that frames of animation were drawn and painted on in preparation for final photography; it's worth your time to read up on traditional animation). In general, for games, a sprite sheet is created containing successive frames of an animation sequence, then software extracts the individual frames and renders them at runtime. In some instances, the sprite sheet is pre-extracted and the frames saved in a special animation format, though this is less and less common.

The second approach to animation is vector-based, as popularized by Flash. In this method, mathematical expressions defined the position, orientation, dimensions and scale of an object as well as the transformations it undergoes, creating animation by modifying objects over time. A key concept in vector-based animation is the keyframe (incidentally, also a term taken from traditional animation, but with a whole new meaning here; in traditional animation, it was a frame drawn by the lead animator to give direction on a character's pose, movement or expression). In vector-based animation, keyframes mark start and stop positions for property interpolations. If you place an object at a point P on keyframe 1, then at Q on keyframe 2, the vector animation software will smoothly move the object from P to Q between the keyframes. By moving the keyframe marker 2 from, say, 15 frames away to 30 frames away, you would make the same change in position occur over twice the duration - twice as slowly. In Flash, you can keyframe a wide variety of properties, including opacity.

Keyframed vector-based animation also employs the concept of ease-ins and ease-outs, or more generally velocity-time graphs, which allow you to modify how quickly or slowly an object begins or stops a transition. For instance, in moving your object from P to Q without ease-ins/-outs, it immediately attains a fixed velocity as soon as it starts leaving P, and maintains that velocity until it reaches Q, at which point it stops abruptly. Real-world objects do not behave like that due to momentum. By applying an ease-in, we can make the object ramp up its speed when leaving P, then slow down as it approaches Q. This is an extremely powerful tool, and those two concepts alone make Flash an extremely capable animation environment.

Flash, of course, also supports raster-based (frame-based or sprite) animation, allowing you to draw each individual frame. Sometimes it's just easier or faster to redraw the object than to try to define all the mathematical transformations for it.

Let me know if this helps, and if there are specific aspects you'd like to know more about.

As a programmer who sometimes dabbles in art creation, I'd also like to chime in with some suggestions. Get a digital camera, or if you can't, borrow one for a couple days. While some people are very good at creating realistic, complex surface texture by hand, it can still be very hard to do and many artists draw heavily upon the real world for coloration and texturing. Snapping a photo of a rusty metal surface, then importing it into Photoshop (or GIMP, or whatever) for some cleanup and tweaking can save you a lot of effort and produce very realistic results. Same with dirt, rock, etc... Mother Nature offers up surface coloration and texture of bewildering complexity, and being able to steal from her as needed can get you up and running as a digital artist. I'm no expert, but I have been able to produce some pretty decent results using texture cobbled together out of my large library of digital photos. For example, here is a random image I created for a 2D isometric game I did some years back. All of the textures used to create it were drawn from digital photographs, edited, and applied to geometry modeled in Blender, then rendered to an image for import into the game. While looking at it now makes me cringe a little, it's still fairly decent considering it was among the first serious attempts at game art I've ever made.

Real world textures come in handy for all sorts of things, but I've also had great luck (being a programmer) by automating many things. In a recent journal entry I talked about blending real-world texture sources with an automated process to generate seamlessly tiling stone floor textures made of irregularly-shaped stones set in mortar. The process definitely requires some tweaking, but it shows what can be done by approaching things from a slightly different point of view.

Expect to spend a lot of time learning the ins and outs of your various software packages, and to waste a lot of pixels ( [grin] ) on things that look bad before you start to make things that look good.

Metallon, when you have your software and want to start making some art you could get further guidance by finding some source images of a style of art you would like to produce, ad we could describe the steps we would take to attempt to produce that kind of thing.

And when you get to the point of loading stuff for your game engine, head to the DirectX/XNA forum where we, the graphics programmer types, like to dwell :)

Thank you all, you've been mighty helpful, to put it very mildly. I have a few things to sell, but after that, I should be ready to hook myself up with the things I need. I'm primarily going to need a new computer (this one sucks, period) and then I'll be getting Inkscape, GIMP, Blender and that Wacom (I have a feeling that tablet is going to make my life much easier!). Speaking of tablets, when it comes to Intuos3, the size of the tablet is only for working space, right? If I understand it correctly then I'll still be looking at the screen, so it'll be like using a mouse but... much much much better ^_^

Now I have to give a few users here a high rating... he he he :D