I found a awesome thread showing how creative the team of civilization is. Or rather not creative, or rather creative in another form. It pretty much stunned me. Tell me what you think please.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422219

Wow, some of those are pretty blatant!

Nice photo-chops they have there.
Edit: I use to make game tiles for Secondlife and my own projects. 99% of the time I use a source image to work off. HERE are some of them if you's want to see.

Yikes.

Some of those are a bit shameless, but pretty much every artist works from photo references, and keeps a ton of photo reference on file. The first step of most projects is to assemble tons of references (often assembled into a mood board), and google image search makes it even easier. They just didn't do a good job to take that reference into their own pieces in most cases.

Pictures of buildings and people won't get much variation because there are standard poses, angles, and composition rules on how to make a subject look interesting. You see one of the icons has the arc de triomphe, and it matches perfectly with that one image. That's because that one image is taken from the right angle to make it look the best. If you google image search it, you'll see all the best pictures of the arc are taken at or near that angle (from either side), with the only difference in the pictures being the time of day. That's also the one of the same angles that CAD software renders buildings at to show them off.

Thats actually pretty awesome. If all of the images are public domain, there is nothing wrong, right?

They've clearly overreacted and not shown how many pieces of images that are like those. The microphone for instance.

At my office I've caught so many artists using unlicensed assets (especially if the art is outsourced). Sometimes they're not even retouched at all!!!

While I don't think it's worth the time to handdraw icons, at least make sure the images are licensed by the company!!!

I'd imagine the Civ team would have had permission to use those images, but who knows (it was likely easier to get away with stealing the images 10 years ago than it is today).

What I'm looking at is a clever and efficient way to generate customized assets... most of them they've sufficiently modified that it's apparent they didn't just slap a filter over the original and call it a day.

What I'm looking at is a clever and efficient way to generate customized assets... most of them they've sufficiently modified that it's apparent they didn't just slap a filter over the original and call it a day.

Yeah.

I think they licensed it all (the stock photo) and if needed, remove the brand (since it different type of licensing) - case in point the refrigirator. And after that they turn it into the same art style, which is nice.

This is pretty normal, and this is how stock photo owner makes money. By licensing it out.

It also happen in movie making. People been taking things and turn it into prop all the time. Even Terranova if I remember spray painted a toy gun black and use it as a gun (Nerf?).