Concept Art Assignments Oct 1st

[Springheel]

Well, I've gotten a few requests from people asking for direction in terms of concept art. I think what I'll do is post a few things that we need to have done and see if there are people willing to do it, for the moment.

 

Currently, I'm going to put god_is_my_goldfish in charge of designing the arrows (since he has already done most of them, as well as the mechanical player tools (mines, flashbombs, etc). He has also requested the Belchers.

 

I am currently working on character designs, including a few new Builder sketches. From there I'll move onto city guards and the like.

 

What I'd like some volunteers for is:

 

Player weapons: the sword is done, but we need sketches for the blackjack and bow.

 

Main Menu: rough sketches of what the main menu might look like

 

Beasties: We will need some kind of craymen or kurshok-like creature. Should be basically humanoid...something that could live underground or in pagan environments. If you can think of something that would suit D3 models/animations, so much the better.

 

Environments: Any type of environmental sketch is good as a way of inspiring our texture artists and future mappers.

 

Other things will have to wait until we sort out our priorities in the other threads. I'll update these later.

 

If you would like to volunteer for what's already up there, please let me know.

Edited October 9, 2004 by Springheel

[New Horizon]

I sent a PM to S_HOLE, the guy who made the thief Retro menu. He says that he currently doesn't know how to make the menu in Doom 3 but he might be interested. We probably won't have to wait for him, since I think we can make any type of menu we want with the Built in GUI editor. I could be wrong on that one though, but it looks promising. I posted the list of Doom Tutorials in the Documentation section.

[Springheel]

Yeah, he really doesn't need to know anything specific...we'd probably just need the graphic image. I suppose we could come up with our own retro-thief menu...if someone would like to take that on, that would be great. Something steampunky like the T1/2 menu.

[god_is_my_goldfish]

I might work on something like that later on if no one else picks it up, but not right now.

[Darkness_Falls]

Player weapons: the sword is done, but we need sketches for the blackjack and bow.

 

Beasties: We will need some kind of craymen or kurshok-like creature. Should be basically humanoid...something that could live underground or in pagan environments. If you can think of something that would suit D3 models/animations, so much the better.

 

I'll work on these.

 

PS: I just posted a sample environmental scene in the Art section:

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...findpost&p=1795

Edited October 6, 2004 by Darkness_Falls

[Renzatic]

We need to make this a sticky.

[Fingernail]

Brr...you must run these things by me first, and instead of an open free-for-all thread, you must assign individual tasks by PM using the format detailed on the sticky thread link, after people have volunteered.

 

Since you are concept art, each task reference should have the following prefix: ACn

 

followed by a four digit number, for instance:

 

ACn0001 might be the main menu concept, etc. etc. And then you have to PM ME with the tasks so that I can keep track of who's doing what.

 

Don't fall out of line, please. It's so difficult to keep things organised.

[Springheel]

after people have volunteered.

 

Well that's the key, isn't it? I can't do that until I get volunteers, which was the point of the message.

[Fingernail]

fair enough. But I have to beat the system into you or you won't learn it.

[Springheel]

I have made threads for both Darkness Fall's craymen idea and god is my goldfish's Belcher concept. Please post anything regarding those projects in those threads only.

[Darkness_Falls]

Here are some concept art references from Thief-TheCircle -- and some 'beast' descriptions -- for T1 and T2. Even though most/all of you have probably already seen this, I thought I'd bring it up to make sure, in case it helps anyone:

 

The Thief Bestiary: All the animals and monsters seen or mentioned in Thief TDP, Thief Gold, or Thief 2.

http://www.thief-thecircle.com/guides/bestiary/

 

T1/T2 Concept Art:

http://www.thief-thecircle.com/media/concepts/

Edited October 7, 2004 by Darkness_Falls

[god_is_my_goldfish]

I think one thing we're trying to do is NOT use the original thief concept art for two reasons-

 

This is not a thief remake, we're doing our own original work for pretty much everything.

 

If we use those, why bother doing concept work at all?

[Darkness_Falls]

They're meant to inspire us, not make us copy them. As artists, we draw from many different resources for inspirations -- and nothing, truly, should be off-limits.

We're not going to "use" that concept artwork in any way other than to inspire us to create our own. Heck, maybe some things will only get slightly tweaked by us to put our own 'stamp of DarkMod approval' on it. But probably not.

 

If you can't tune the original concept artwork out when you're making your own stuff, then don't look at it... is the only advice I can give. To me, it's helpful to view these things and thought I was doing a favor by sharing what I found with others. If I'm going to be working on Kurshok- or Craymen-like creatures... or blackjacks or bows... I think it's best that I know a little bit of what the original ones look like and even see some concepts.

 

From the DarkMod website, it states:

The aim is probably best defined in laymans terms as:

Problem: People want to make fan missions for Thief 3

Solution: We create an environment as close to Thief 3 as possible so that people can make fan missions.

 

Resembling Thief games would not be a bad thing, since I think that's why most of us were drawn to begin working on DarkMod in the first place.

 

If Disney was going to make a new Transformers-like movie but didn't hold the rights to Transformers, are they not going to watch past Transformers episodes just because they're making their own spin on it? Heck no, they'd totally study past Transformers episodes and movies, and anything else they could get their hands on. Nothing would be off limits for their artists.

 

It's all about studying what you're working on. If I'm working on tables, it's best to look at pictures of tables for reference. If I'm working on pillars, it's best to look at existing pillars for reference. Etc.

[god_is_my_goldfish]

Not really, my only fear is that eidos might find out and act like it's "a big threat" to it's i.p.

 

Which is retarded. I do use the originals for inspiration, but don't think tha the offical stuff should be interpreted as our own.

[sparhawk]

Not really, my only fear is that eidos might find out and act like it's "a big threat" to it's i.p.

 

Which is retarded. I do use the originals for inspiration, but don't think tha the offical stuff should be interpreted as our own.

As long as you don't make it a 1:1 copy it will be fine. Keeping the files that show the progress of the work, or keeping concept sketches also can be used to prove that you did not copy the work. Looking at the original art should be fine and I doubt that they can sue us about this.

On a related note. If this would be possible, there wouldn't be a desktop for Linux looking like Windows 98 because Microsoft would have stopped this.

 

So looking at it for inspiration is fine, but not taking it directly.

 

Especially when you look at the concept art because the final model will look quite different then the concept art.