Application Of Concept And Texture Art In Digital Graphics

Concept art is the illustrations done to convey ideas and thoughts for use in visual media before it is implemented into the final product. This is important as designing a full asset is harder from imagination and giving concept art to a team conveys the concept artists idea more thoroughly than a written document. It is often used in conjunction with a document describing the philosophy implemented into the design in detail; this is then pitched to whoever is funding the project, often a large studio. However, even after the game has received funding, any new concepts or alterations to existing concepts still have concept art illustrated to detail how the object will look.

Concept Art that has been refined, lined and shaded. Concept art goes through a number of stages in any medium, where it initially starts as a series of quick sketches that allow the artist to explore various iterations of a design. The ones that are most representative of what the creative influence of the project wants are then refined, often in a tool like illustrator and shaded so that they can be developed into whatever medium the project is taking place in. In the context of video games, this would result in either a sprite artist continuing the idea into a 2D sprite or a 3D modeller creating a 3D model out of the concept sketch and then refining it into an asset that can be used in game.

Concept art that is also annotated. Concept art usually details either an asset in a game, such as a character, vehicle or weapon, or the environment of the game. In respect to drawing concept art of the asset of a game, the concept artist would likely draw it from flat pane perspectives i. e. front, back, portrait and overhead, as long as they're relevant to the assets design and show distinct detail. Furthermore, in order to make specific details apparent to the viewer of the concept art, the concept art is often concisely annotated. Environmental concept art is largely the same however a character designer is charged with bringing characters and "brilliant ideas to life" i. e. how a character would move, whereas an environment artist would spend more time thinking about perspective and how each object of the environment would look in respects to this.

Texture Art

Texture art is art that is mapped over a 3D model in any type of media that requires this. This means that a texture artist is a 2D artist "who can 'skin' an object in his mind and create a compelling set of textures to 'paint' that skin on the 3D model". This includes animation for video e. g. movies and TV shows, as well as 3D models in video games. Texture artists are often charged with creating photo-realistic textures to be overlaid onto a 3D model to, essentially, paint the models and simulate the texture of an object e. g. if its a certain feel the artist has to simulate it. This can be seen above as a model of a sphere is overlaid with an image of a map of the earth to create an object that resembles a globe.

In the context of video games, textures have historically progressed towards being more and more photo realistic, however not all games call for photo realistic textures. This is the case in a game like Overwatch, which has a very cartoon-like theme/art style. This results in the characters and environments having very smooth textures that are not at all realistic.