Big Huge Art Challenge Winners

On behalf of the art team at Big Huge Games I'd like to congratulate the winners of the Big Huge Art Challenge. In the 3D competition Gavin Goulden took top honors with Donovan Keele taking second, and Ching Lau finishing 3rd. For his efforts Gavin will receive an Xbox360 Elite or $500, a team-autographed copy of Rise of Legends, a team-autographed Rise of Legends poster, and a Catan Xbox360 Live Arcade t-shirt. An interview with Gavin can be found here. The winning entry pose...

In the concept art competition top honors went to Marco Mazzoni with Brendan Keough taking 2nd, and David Mitchell finishing 3rd. Marco will receive a Wii or $250, a team-autographed copy of Rise of Legends, a team-autographed Rise of Legends poster, and a Catan Xbox360 Live Arcade t-shirt. An interview with Marco can be found here. The winning entry...
We'd like to thank Gameartisans.org's Fredrik Hultqvist for doing such a phenomenal job putting the contest together and keeping it all coordinated. Never one to rest, he's already got a new competition underway.

Recent Publications

A few months ago I picked up a subscription to ImagineFX, a fantasy and digital arts magazine out of the UK. Their latest issue (July '07) is predominantly video game art related and features works from Heavenly Sword, Metal Gear Solid, Halo, Half-Life 2 and many more. The articles focus on concept development with tips and commentary from notable industry artists such as JP Targete, Xavier Marquis, Christian Bravery, Daniel Dociu and Viktor Antonov. If you're a concept artist yearning to break into the industry try to look past the rather steep bookstand price as it's well worth the import cost.

Another recent release out of the UK covers much of the same, EDGE Presents: The Art of Videogames. From the publisher... "As its title suggests, this new Edge special edition showcases the visual aspect of gaming, its 260 pages adorned with paintings, renders, sketches and more materials from some of the industry's leading artists.
Also included are interviews with key creatives in which they explain the thinking behind their work, with contributions from developers at Bungie (Halo series), Eden (Alone In The Dark, Test Drive Unlimited), Epic (Gears Of War), Maxis (Spore), Ninja Theory (Heavenly Sword), SCEE (Wipeout) and Valve (Half-Life 2), to name but a handful."

And lastly, a few days ago I picked up a copy of the God of War 2 Strategy Guide, less for the guide and more for the included book bonus The Art of GoW2. While all the artwork is fantastic I found the attention paid to environmental design the most inspiring.

On a related note, the GoW2 concept art team (Andy Park, Charlie Wen, Cecil Kim, Dwayne Turner, Erik San Juan, Ryan Meinerding, and Scott Seeto) was honored with an art show and book signing this past May at Gallery Nucleus...

The Art of God of War art show / book signing
May 12 - May 13, 2007
Opening Reception Saturday May 12 7pm - 11pm

"We beckon all mortals to revel in the visual feast that is The Art of the God of War. Too often we only see the final product and not the inspiration that goes into creating that product.
This event will give everyone a chance to take a closer look at the artists and creative talent behind the scenes of one of the best games of 2007. The work, although commercial, proves worthy to be framed and hanged and appreciated by game lovers fantasy lovers and art lovers alike."

(Coin-op TV Show Coverage)

After seeing the show's poster design on the Gallery Nucleus site I called them up to inquire about its purchase availability. They quoted a price that seemed a little high for a poster and I nearly passed on it. Before deciding to pass I asked how many were printed and they said, "Oh... well actually it's one of a kind. It was the promo poster from our gallery. We didn't actually mass produce it." After hearing that I snapped it up. If you happen to own one just like it please keep that info to yourself and allow me to go on happily thinking mine is the only one :-)

Here it is...

Game Art Outsourcing

The games industry is a fast-moving, ever-evolving beast. The release of new consoles and faster computers open up the potential for even more amazing visuals, placing ever-increasing demands on art production. In order to remain an agile and competitive department we've had to force ourselves to become comfortable with looking beyond the hallways of Big Huge for additional art resources. We used outsourcing to a small degree towards the end of development on Rise of Legends. Nearly all of our building LOD's were sent out of house. The team, while initially cautious, seemed quite happy with the end result. LOD work is not the most exciting of tasks and sending it out allowed internal focus to be placed on much more challenging and interesting work. These days our internal 3D artists often approach their work with the mindset of creating the ideal asset (by "ideal" we mean the item every artist, internal or external, looks to emulate when similar assets are produced). Once the ideal asset is complete then a detailed how-to tutorial is assembled to go along with it. Whereas word docs were the norm during Rise of Legends, these days detailed step-by-step videos are our tutorial documentation tool of choice (see earlier post on Camstudio). Videos of the actual software process along with artist narration provide an easy-to-follow template. Each time we bring a new fulltime hire, contractor, or intern up to speed via the video tutorials we save valuable veteran artists bandwidth. Another way to look at it, one 10 minute video viewed by six fellow artists provides the author with an additional hour's worth of production (NOTE: I asked one of our talented programmers to check my math on that last point and it received a thumbs up). I feel confident that talented artists willing and able to effectively communicate their techniques will be the ones that prosper the most as outsourcing gains increased industry momentum. I can certainly see a day where each and every artist in our department has their own external production staff of three to five individuals that they are charged with leading and directing.

Getting back to present day, at the moment we're working on a couple of art asset heavy titles and have increased the range and amount of tasks that we're comfortable seeking external help on. We've had the most success outsourcing items such as lopoly & hipoly modeling, zbrush, texturing, opening cinematics, icons and LOD creation. In order to streamline our contractor approach we've created a couple of new online tools - a contractor application form and message board. Advertising our application form (located at http://www.bighugeconnect.com/) on various websites and industry-related message boards has provided us with a steady stream of game art applicants. I have an outlook folder where the best of the best submissions are culled and sorted by specialty. Whenever we find ourselves spread too thin internally we simply send a few emails out to applicants previously marked as potential outsourcing partners. With their help more often than not we're able to quickly tame most schedule risks. We've also started a detailed log of how successful, or unsuccessful, our working relationships with external vendors have been. This allows us to favor those that seem happy working with us and that we're happy working with. The second piece of tech that we've added is a contractor message board. Once we sign an external artist up he/she is given a user pass and directed to a private, secure thread where their work assignment awaits (often with previously mentioned tutorial video). Contractors are asked to frequently document their progress via daily updates to that same thread. We in turn keep all feedback and direction documented there. Each side receives instant email notifications to any new posts. So far the message board system with email notification has limited one of the biggest dangers of outsourcing - lost production time due to confusion and poor communication. Recently we've also added an online billing tool that sends clear and consistent contractor payment request to our Operations Department. Additionally we're seeking a dedicated Art Outsourcing Manager that will continue driving it all forward.

Added bonuses of becoming more comfortable with outsourcing - team size flexibility along with additional recruitment opportunities. We can quickly increase our team size at will, reducing the need to carry a large art team in between contracts as well as being able to quickly ramp up art bandwidth. That ability is quite nice when suddenly we find ourselves with more work than we can reasonably handle. On the recruitment end we'll often try a potential fulltime candidate out with some initial contract assingments. The candidate gets to try us on while we try them on. If the resulting work is of high quality and communication is smooth on both sides then it's a promising sign that they'll be happy and productive in a fulltime position.

Areas where we haven't been as successful in outsourcing has been in animation and concept development. We've made it a point to increase our internal capabilities by bolstering the ranks in each of these specialties. Having strong internal concepting skills also has the added bonus of constantly fueling the team's excitement via a steady stream of inspiring visuals.

Here's some business cards that we recently printed up in order to further spread the word about our contractor application site (What are you waiting for? Sign on up, we'd love to work with you!)...

(card back)

(card front)