Hello again!
Bruno already told you in the last update, I’ve just finished the character concepts arts. I’ve done around 100 concepts since the start of the project, and I think that, having finished the entire set, it’s a good time to start telling you the making of those characterss, back from the first week of April 2009.

At that stage of the project we’re working in the Tsar Project for a month, basically developing the idea, researching and searching for plots that would express our goals. And then came the question: how to translate all this visually?

To answer this I’ve first worked in the characters graphic style. Interestingly, after those 8 months, and all the researches I’ve done along with Ingrid for our graduation project, we’ve developed a methodology of creating visual worlds focused exactly in the characters style.

Some of our first references were illustrations by Vladmir Semenov

This creative process started with the selection of a character that could be both generic enough so it won’t need many individual features and could carry as many cultural and contextual elements as possible. A soldier was a natural choice at the time: we’ll have plenty of them in the Kremlin and they seemed the more neutral characters in the cast. Upon that, Muscovy armors and arms from the period were some of our major visual references in the beginning of the project.

Set the character, a Muscovy soldier wearing a heavy armor  and wielding a spear-axe, I’ve done a set of sketches during the first two weeks of April. What I had in mind was to see all the possibilities, from realism to pure geometric abstraction, from childish cartoons to the complex frenchphonic comics. The result was the next image, that we now call the Father of all Tsar Art. He’s a hand drawn lad 2 and a half inches high, made of indian ink and markers.

The next step was choosing a direction to go and explore it deeper, testing other characters in the same style. I’ve done that with another soldier, lighter and faster, and with a nobleman. A very synthesized style turn to coherent and flexible, allowing good consistency for the characters without needing too much visual complexity, just what we’re looking for.

And how the character creation continued I’ll tell you on my next post! See you soon!

Hello again!

As I was saying, Easy Paint Tool SAI is remarkably different of other painting software, but now let me explain it better. Among those fundamental differences is the Water brush. Unfortunately I jut can’t tell exactly what makes this brush so special, even 2 months after my first contact with it and the intensive work I’ve done in it in the last weeks. The fact is that it is simply different of any brush I’ve used in Photoshop and Painter. To give you an idea it’s similar to the Artist’s Oil brush in Corel Painter, the one, by the way, that I used most until now. But Water has an unique dynamic of use, it’s trace just flows, it can vary opacity, color and width by pen’s pressure, and it blends and changes the colors already in the canvas in a awesome way. To show you a little about this dynamics I’ll present now a simple walk through of one of the Concepts I’ve been working on, an Outside Yard of the Moscow Kremlin Palaces.

In the first step I’ve traced the plan of the two stories of buildings that would be done, I’ve used just the Water brush with Noise at this point.

After that I’ve started the illustration proper. It was done using some layers, as it would be useful have the concept being modular and flexible, being able to represent both outside and inside areas. One of the main goes of this concept was to map tilesets, the pieces of patters and textures that can be applied on surfaces, making easier to cover big areas. In this case it happened specially in the ground, the roofs and in stonewalls, where the tiles where used in a much more loose way then normally it’s done, not having geometric precise limits and normally leaving gaps that I would fill manually. I’m considering using this same loose system in the final graphics of the game.

Now to SAI’s high point, in my opinion: lighting. It has some features of layer blending that are really amazing. The one that caught my attention in the first glance was Lumi&Shade, great to create both projected light and enlightened objects. As the name suggests, it blends luminance and hue, helping in creating nice lighting effects. Another essential is PassTrought, that is applied to layer groups and allows each layer’s blending mode to interact with the layers outside the group. It’s quite important to allow the layers being properly organized.

So, at the end of 3 weeks of work (during which I’ve been creating 3 other background concepts, helping Bruno and Ingrid create the character’s color test vector files and already doing some of those color tests myself), the result of the Outside Yard is this:

Now I’ve gotta go, my trial period with SAI is running out and I must go buy it to continue my work. Incidentally, one more good thing about it: a single license costs just 50 dollars.

See you soon!

Oh hello there!

In this last fortnight the Design Guys have written a little about the level design of the Tsar Project. As Beto said, today I’ll show something of the translation of the architecture researches we’ve done and the level design created in the background concept arts. And even more, I’ll talk about a really great software we’re using, the japanese Easy Paint Tool SAI.

So, it all started with 17th century maps like this one above (a crop of a dutch map published in 1662 that covers the area between Beklemishevskaya and Nikolskaya Towers of the Moscow Kremlin). Those maps show us the Kremlin just after the start of the Romanov Era, when it past for several changes. The exact period in which we focused our researches for the Tsar Project is considerably blurred by time, we’ve had a hard time in finding what we needed to start the reconstruction of the palaces proper. It was then, and continues to be, a great luck and reason of happiness to us, to count with the collaboration of Julia Tarabarina, a historian of russian architecture and editor of the Russian Architectural News Agency.

With the proper orientation we’re able to continue the development of the level design, according to the architecture of the 16th century buildings, and start creating those schematic maps Beto told you about. The next step was then to translate plans, references and level design into concept arts. The point here was to create imagery that would both communicate the mood of the game and be a preview of the different types of tiles, textures and lightning effects that we would use later on the project.

And then SAI came up. A good friend of Aduge, a fish from the design college called Okazaki, presented me this tiny software (it’s installer being smaller than 3Mb) that is tremendously useful. As the name emphatically tells, Easy Paint Tool SAI is a user-friendly digital painting software. What the name doesn’t say is that, despite the minute size of the software and of it’s Tokyo based development team, Systemax’s SAI is, imo, far more precise and powerful than Adobe’s Photoshop and stratospherically more intuitive and fluid to use and configure than Corel’s Painter.

To be continued…