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Ah, the Artists' Corner. Where beret-clad
artistes sip espresso and sketch the Eiffel Tower in the gentle Parisian
dusk. Wait, wrong corner. GIGnews' Artists' Corner features helpful game
industry information and inspiration.
 The
"SimpleGuy": A Review of and Tutorial for an Intuitive Maya Biped
Character Puppet
By Kris Kapp
Kris Kapp has spent a lot of time rigging characters and, mainly,
he's come to rely on using scripts for most of the repetitious work, but
it is still a time consuming process to completely rig a character for
animation, hence his enthusiasm for the SimpleGuy, an intuitive
Maya biped puppet which he found to be a great tool...More
(February 2003)
Rigging
a Vehicle by Kris Kapp
Kris Kapp recently spent a considerable amount of time rigging various
vehicles for animation and came up with a few tricks...More
(March 2002)
Interview With the
Goddess: A Chat With Paul Steed
In this interview, Melanie chats up Producer/Artist
Paul Steed. Steed’s mastery of modeling,
animation and the creation/direction of cinematic
sequences on high profile games such as the Wing
Commander and Quake series has garnered him
considerable recognition and praise....More
Kris
Kapp's SIGGRAPH Wrap Up
by, not surprisingly, Kris
Kapp
This was my first trip to SIGGRAPH and, quite frankly, I was a bit
under-whelmed. The show seemed to mirror the current perception of a
downward trend in the industry. Everyone I spoke with remarked on how
the crowds were much smaller than in the past, and I noticed that there
were quite a few empty spaces on the exhibit floor. Nevertheless, there
were events of note...More
(September 2001)
Chicken Head Setup
by Kris Kapp -- Addendum -- More UV Mapping Fun with the Chicken by
Kris Kapp
Last time I showed an example of how to generate UVs for a nurb-to-poly
object by using the chicken’s head as an example. I did it that way
because I was having hard time working with Maya’s UV tools. Maya does
some strange things with the way it does its cylinder mapping, and I
ended up laying out the UVs for the head pretty much by hand...More
(September 2001)
Chicken
Head Set Up by Kris Kapp
Finger lickin' good Kris Kapp ties on his Maya apron and sets his sights
on the chicken head...More
(August 2001)
 Your
first dance with the chicken? Get caught up on all the chicken scratch:
Character
Animation Part 1 – Character Modeling using Nurbs Primitives and
Sub-Divisions Surfaces Or How to Make a Chicken From Scratch by Kris
Kapp
I modeled this chicken over the course of a couple of evenings. I needed
a character that would offset my last one, the Rabbit of the Apocalypse.
The rabbit character is tall, emaciated, and rather sickly. I wanted the
next character to be more robust. So, after a buddy gave me a t-shirt
from a bar in New Hampshire called the Black Cock, I knew what my next
character would be...More
Character
Animation Part 2 – Foot Setup For a Chicken by Kris Kapp
Last time I talked about modeling the chicken. This time I’ll go into
how I set up the foot controls. I decided to use a "reverse
foot" to drive the leg IK. The advantage of the reverse foot is
that it gives you a solid heel that you can plant just like a real foot.
Normally you would build a skeleton and do a test bind on the geometry
before building fancy controls...More
Basic Skeletion Set-Up for "The
Chicken" by Kris Kapp
Kris Kapp goes back into the Maya kitchen for some ribs and wings...More
Making Games
with Caligari trueSpace: An Introduction by Isaac Vanier
There are plenty of choices out there when it comes to 3D modeling and
animation programs. The only problem is that most of them cost an arm
and a leg – and that doesn’t include the computer required to run
them. If you’re one of those fortunate enough to be on a project
endowed with a magnificent seven figure budget, you’re all set. But if you’re
one of us less fortunates, you can be faced with a handful
of choices that range from bad to worse...More
Working
So Others Can Play: Jobs in Video Game Development
Part
2: Artists and Sound Designers
by Olivia Crosby
Nothing grabs a player's attention faster than the images on the screen.
Artists create those graphics. During the concept stages of development,
concept artists draw sketches and storyboards to illustrate and
embellish the designers' ideas. Artists later create all the artwork the
design document calls for, including creatures, settings, vehicles, and
icons...More
Depth
of Field as a Post Process: A Maya Tutorial
by Kris Kapp
...When
I started messing around with his tutorial I immediately realized that I
could use the sampler node info much like a Z buffer but with much more
controllable results...More
Maya
Tutorial Part 1: FK to IK Leg
Setup in Maya
By Kris Kapp
Maya Tutorial Part
2:
Calculating Secondary Action Based on Skeletal Animation
By Kris Kapp
Creating
Rich and Beautiful Texture Art
by
Eni Oken
One of the most important techniques used
to create texture art that is rich and full of depth is called "layering".
Widely used in the traditional art world,
"layering" is still not very well known in the gaming
industry, even though good texture art is vital for the success of any
game project More...
Video Games and Online Worlds
as Art
by Raph Koster
To my mind, all arts are based around
communicating something. They use a particular medium to communicate
within the constraints of that medium, and often what is communicated is,
in fact, thoughts about the medium itself (in other words, a
formalist approach to arts--much modern art falls in this category). The
medium shapes the nature of the message, of course, but the message can
be representational, impressionistic, narrative, emotional,
intellectual, or whatever else. Some art forms are solo, and some are
collaborative (and they can all be made collaborative to an extent, I
believe). And some media are actually the result of the collaboration of
specialists in many different media, working together to present a work
that is incomplete without the use of multiple media within it. Film is
one such medium. And video games is another...More
Setting
Up Directory Structures for Lightwave
by Victor Osaka
In this real-world, real-job practical
and informative Lightwave article, Victor Osaka
addresses three topics regarding directory structures: ease of use
through standardizing; protecting your stock files by using
proper directory methods; And to make make backing up even
easier. More..
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