Crysis Hellfire

As announced a few weeks ago, my team is working on the Crysis modification: Crysis Hellfire.
It will be a 4-player coop game with a few RPG elements.
The story is taking place after Crysis 1:
The humans have tried to destroy the aliens with nuclear weapons.
In this war the world got almost completely destroyed and the aliens survived, as they absorbed the energy. You and 3 other heroes that have a new nanosuit are trying to save the last bit of human civilization. In order to do so, you will need to upgrade your nanosuit with better weapons.

I am leading the art section, trying to accomplish a fantastic atmosphere in the game. A lot has happened since we've started this project.

We have produced concepts for the environment, the "Hellfire" Nanosuit, the weapons and the enemies (aliens).
We have selected certain concepts and we are currently building them in 3D.
We have worked on a lava shader.
We have a prototype for the menu which we made with Scaleform.
We have changed from CryEngine 2 to the new CryEngine 3 as following things are just much better in version 3:
- The engine calculates the destruction of objects!
- The multiplayer A.I. is implemented.
- The Sandbox (Editor) is solid.

Visit the Website to see the trailer:
www.crysis-hellfire.de

Here are a few moodpaintings that I have painted:

Parkour Character

Practicing Character Design with many different poses for my portfolio.

Watercolor

My girlfriend bought some awesome watercolors (Winsor & Newton) for me :D

Follow Fred in Making Games Magazine

There will be an article about the development process of Follow Fred
Pictures and reports about our experiences are included.
It can be read in the next issue of the making games magazine!

Very Talented Artist: Eric Eschrich

Check out the blog of Eric Eschrich:
http://e2-designs.blogspot.com/

He is my classmate at the Games Academy.

Creating Awesome Shapes

Today I created a few interesting and at first quite simple silhouettes that I shifted together in Photoshop until I had a cool shape. It's a fast way to find good designs. There is a tool that does exactly the same (creating random silhouettes), it's called Alchemy. Many professional concept artists, such as Andrew Jones and Barontieri work with it and I asked myself: Wouldn't a real industrial designer laugh at such a tool because you don't actually derive shapes from the functionality of objects anymore but from flukes? I used to think that the PC adopts too much work, comparable to a filter in Photoshop. I thought you wouldn't use the design vocabulary to express certain ideas but instead use random shapes that are constructs of a few design elements and thus you wouldn't have designs that would support your idea perfectly. For example: If you want to express something aggressive you should use edgy shapes. So when you are drawing your designs, you can use triangles, as simplest design element that would probably support your idea of an aggressive object strongly. However, when you are using random shapes, you would integrate other design elements, as your shapes consist of more than triangles.

But when I tried out the approach of putting many unique shapes together to find interesting silhouettes, I understood that this way of thinking was too restricted.
For me, this part of concept designing is there to quickly find a composition of your object that is easy to "read", I mean, not too chaotic, but interesting for the viewer. After finding an interesting shape, you can still apply the design vocabulary. You can e.g. simplify your curvy silhouette to a rather edgy one to show aggressiveness. Or you can now think about whether your silhouette makes sense, if you have to use include a certain anatomy.

So my conclusion is, that the approach of using unique shapes to create an interesting silhouette is a legitimate and fast way to start a concept design.
The result is not necessarily based on luck, because the process of shifting the shapes always ends with the decision of how it would look the best and decisions have nothing to do with coincidence. These are my thoughts of this sketching approach, comments are welcome as always and here are the sketches that I've created:

John Eaves - Blog

John Eaves is a designer and illustrator best known for his work on the Star Trek franchise. He served as a production artist on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Enterprise and was involved in all four Next Generation movies, specifically being responsible for the design of the Sovereign-class Enterprise-E.

Here is his very interesting blogs (I just can't get enough from his designs!!!):

http://johneaves.wordpress.com

Professional Approach for Illustrators

I've found this video on the massive black youtube account and wanted to share it.
You can see the approach of Donato Giancola having thumbnail sketches, taking references and painting the final image with these pre-steps.
It is a typical approach, a lot of professional illustrators work like that, so in case you did not know that, you do now! :D

Ich wartete auf mein Glück und da erschienst du...

This is my entry for the German Manga Contest:
"Manga Talents 2010" within the Leipzig Bookfair.
This year's subject is "Glück", which has different meanings in German. Glück can mean, happiness, chance, luck, fortune or bliss. This is also the reason why I decided to keep the German version for the title.
The Translation would be "I waited for my [Glück] and you appeared..."

This painting is dedicated to my girlfriend Ann-Sophie Paul.
It is supposed to show my feelings when she's around, the warmth that she brings with her. I wanted to express the same feeling that I had when I saw Robert Chang's (Lunatique) Portraits of his wife Elena. There was some kind of atmosphere making me think: "Wow! That guy must really love her!" Although very different in style, they were my inspiration for my painting:

http://lunatique.cgsociety.org/gallery/186343/
http://lunatique.cgsociety.org/gallery/124550/


I hope I have achieved my aim.

Steampunk - Floating Islands

This is a concept for a project at the Games Academy, its subject is "Steampunk".
I am not in the team working on the Steampunk project, as I am in the Crysis-Mod team, but I anyway made a concept for them, as my 3D lecturer Philip Unger suggested me to do so.