comic-con 2002

by sumir on 08/09/2002 12:19:48 -0700

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When I saw in the Comic-Con Events guide that there was a panel called "The Art of Video Games," I knew I had to attend. I was not really sure what to expect, but I had hoped for, perhaps a discussion of the future of video games: 3-D polygon versus cell-shading, that kind of thing. Also a discussion of the evolution of video games from the past through the present would have been interesting. However, what the panel actually presented was quite different than what I had imagined.

Present at the panel were a number of artists who had worked on games such as Factor Five's Star Wars Rogue Leader, Medal of Honor Frontline, and Spider-Man. Early in the program, and much to my geeky delight, the audience discovered that this presentation was going to focus on the technical details of art – basically how an artists' concept actually gets incorporated into a video game. The panel discussed every stage of video game art, from 2-D pencil drawing, all the way to the incorporating a completed and rendered image into a graphics engine.

The first step of the process is the drawing and conceptual art: basically the pre-production stages. The artists all lamented that there was never enough time allocated to the pre-production stages and noted that more pre-production time would lead to less problems in later stages of development. After the initial concepts were developed, orthographic front, top, and side-view drawings, they would be digitized. Usually this would be done with the ever popular Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is generally also used to create the skins, or textures of surfaces and characters within games. Once the 2-D surfaces and drawings were incorporated, next they are rendered into 3-D through such software as Maya, and the skins are "projected" onto the 3-D mesh. Several Levels of Detail (or LOD) are created – the lower LODs are for characters and items further away, and use less graphics processing power than characters in the foreground, which need a higher LOD.

The artists compared development for different platforms – PS2, Gamecube, and Xbox namely. The general consensus was that the Gamecube and the Xbox were the "new kids on the block" and therefore more powerful. That is, as they said, how the development cycle works. – there will always be a more powerful platform being released. It was also noted that each platform has its own particular problems with development – the PS2 has a low Graphics RAM, and the Gamecube has problems with Alpha channels, for example.

After all the technical details were discussed, however, there was somewhat of a ludicrous discussion between two members of the panel. David Stripinis, the Rogue Leader artist got into a disagreement with an artist who worked almost exclusively on in-game cut-scenes, as well as full motion video (or FMV). Stripinis believed that games did not need any cut-scenes at all and believed that games would be better without them. While he did have a valid point in that some games are just excessive when it comes to cut-scenes (Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty came to my mind), I don't believe that many in attendance agreed that all in-game movies should be removed. In essence, his point was a little extreme. Nonetheless, though, the information presented at the panel was very informative, and it satiated my appetite for some techno-geeky discussion at Comic-Con.

- Adam

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