Jake Brooks: Games Art 2024-25

 Real Worlds - Key Art and Character Design Sheets Character Design Sheets Leading on from the feedback I received from Mantic Games, I began by redesigning the Character sheets, making little tweaks to the designs overall. Starting with the Forge Fathers, using the original design as reference, I started drawing the front and back views, making the dwarf shorter, wider and overall stronger looking with a focus to the bulky armour. I wanted to add some variation in there to this boss enemy, so I thought it would be a good idea to make it so the appearance of the Spark Master can differ per playthrough, with different facial hair, hair colour and accessories, just little things to add some variety. I then made the back view, which I focused on matching the aesthetic of the front view. For this, I just added the details similar to the front and added a rim around the back of the head for protection. I also took the hammer from before and made the handle wider. Overall I think I cover...

 Real Worlds: Client Feedback This week was the client review. We each had a 10 minute slot to pitch our idea to the guys from Mantic Games. This was a brief window, so as seen in my previous blog, I made my presentation short with little text within it so they would spend less time reading and more time giving feedback. First, the client spoke about things they liked about my designs. Forge Fathers - Positives: In terms of the positives for the Forge Fathers, they really liked the proportions of the character and the thumbnails. They said I got the overall shape and design language down, as well as making the characters the appropriate height. They really liked the concept for the game and the boss having a place within it as something the player will fight, furthermore, they liked the idea of the multiple phase fight with the changes between the phases. Matsudan - Positives: They said that the Matsudan armour set I had designed was really good, and they really liked the hat on to...

 Real Worlds - Client Review Here are all the slides from the presentation created for the Mantic client review.

 Real Worlds - Character Sheets for Client Review Following on from the thumbnails, I created character sheets for both of my characters. Starting off with the Forge Fathers, the character I created is called "Spark Master". This will be a boss-type enemy that the player will fight. My idea behind this is that he would have two phases - The first being where his hammer is deactivated and fights with physical attacks, and the second where the sides of the hammer extend, and he becomes electrified - hence the name. This character fits in with the overall aesthetic of the Forge Fathers, whilst still being unique enough to be fitting of the boss role. I stuck with the hammer, as it fits the genre more with the focus being on melee combat more than anything. In terms of the Matsudan, I previously said that I wanted to keep the look with the broken sword. That is what I did here first, then I fixed the proportions, added the colours and added some extra features onto the character....

 Toolkit 2D - Lineless Art Experiment Usually, I use line art within my digital art as it is just what I'm accustomed to at this point. We experimented with using blocks of colour and tone instead, to show the form instead of the lines. This forces us to think in terms of shapes more and not lines. We start by creating line art for something. We then set the lines to multiply and adjust the levels before we paint to make the values pop more. We then refine as we go in terms of values. Here is my line art. Below is the results of my experiment. Honestly I am pretty happy with how this turned out. I have pretty chunky linearity, and even despite that it has turned out really well. It is definitely better to think of drawing in terms of shapes rather than lines, and this approach forces you to do that.

 Toolkit 3D - Retopology in Blender Within Blender, there are two main ways to approach retopology. These are manual and automatic. Firstly, I looked at automatic. This is from an addon that can be used with Blender called QuadRemesher, which will automatically make our overall topology better. Here I am using an example model. I have used the subdivision surface modifier to increase my poly count massively. The overall topology is good, but still, the poly count is now far too high. In a rigging workflow, where we are trying to create a game ready character, this would be a problem. Going to the sidebar after selecting the object, we can then open Quad Remesher, and it opens this menu. Right now, our face count is near 400,000, which is not close to what I want, especially since it is only a base mesh. If we move this down to about 20,000 within the Quad Remesh menu, and press remesh, we get results. This addon is great, and can massively improve a workflow by automating the retop...

 In-Engine 3D Character - The Proposal For this project, the aim was to create an original character with diverse design traits. For this part of the project, we started by conceptualizing the characters from thumbnails to orthographic drawings. Before starting with the initial ideation, I wanted to look at jobs and roles within different creative industries, looking at what makes them different as well comparing them. I also more specifically look at artists within the games industry and their specific approaches to how they deal with digital and traditional processes and workflows to further my understanding and efficiency of how to manage my own. Jobs in the Creative Industry In the creative industry, there are many different areas for jobs and roles, such as manufacturing, VFX, game artists, graphic designers and animation just to name a few. I will go through a few industries explaining what they do as well as comparing/contrasting them to the games industry. In terms of manuf...

 Toolkit 3D - IK Handles With the previous rig blogs done, this is where I will show and explain IK handles. Firstly, an IK handle is an object that you can select and move. It affects the joints is assigned to. It can be used to pose an entire joint chain, such as an arm, leg or spine. Going back to the rig I have created, this is what it looks like so far. This is with the arms, spine and legs completed. If we want to pose this properly, we need to implement IK handles. For the legs, I extrude from the heel to create another bone, and give it the IK prefix on the bone name. This is going to be our control bone. Next I select the shin, and go into pose mode. We then go to bone constraints, create an IK Handle, and set the settings as seen below. We set the target to our rig we created, the bone to the control bone we created, and because we want it to control the skin, the foot and the thigh, we select 2 for the chain length. We then go into edit mode, and remove the parent to the...