Progress as an Artist, Talk About Aliens

Development of artwork, requests, suggestions, samples, or if you have artwork to offer. Primarily for the artists.
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nnnslogan
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Progress as an Artist, Talk About Aliens

#1 Post by nnnslogan »

I have recently learned some new graphics apps. I've been a 3D Studio Max user for a long time, but I just completed tutorial series on Mudbox, ZBrush, and Maya, and intend to do more on Maya, which is basically a lot like Max. Soon I should be ready to start making some game content for this project if you guys still need some stuff. I think it's a good opportunity for me to fill out my portfolio more.

I guess my next question is about file formats. Are you going to need textured 3D models in a specific format? Will there be in-game support for realtime 3D characters and ships, or just pre-rendered images and animations? If there will be 3D objects, will there be normals maps or just the standard bump maps? What will be the target resolution for polycounts?

If you guys don't have any alien races nailed down yet, I'm more than willing to create some. I wish we could get the rights to use the races from Larry Niven's Known Space setting. They would be fun to make.

I know some have voiced a desire to inject more realism in the game by making the aliens more alien than the stereotypes of popular scifi. I've had that thought before, and can explain why it is a difficult problem.

Usually when someone says they want aliens that don't resemble earth creatures or hominids, what you end up with is either some kind of wacky cyborgs (still essentially based on something we're familiar with) or something based on animals from earth to some extent, or you end up with something that looks like a mineral life form, or a ball of light. We kind of went down some of these roads in the original Master of Orion, as did Star Trek and Star Wars and other scifi shows.

It's actually a pretty serious hassle to create "realistic" alien life forms based on the premise that life evolved completely independently. It's a lot of work figuring that stuff out. Scifi writers have been doing it for a long time, and most of the time it somehow resembles earth life.

Here are some interesting things that reassure me that it's okay to make up whatever kind of aliens are attractive to you, whether it's fantasy creatures like elves and orcs... er, I mean, vulcans and klingons... or animal mutation variants.

The inspiration for much scifi is the alleged experiences of people who claim to have had close encounters with extraterrestrials. Although the media has tried to lump the aliens from these encounters into one type, the actual details are pretty diverse. Yes, there are human or humanoid aliens reported, but they're not always the "grays" with the big, almost-shaped black eyes and birdlike talons. For example, although they are portrayed as grays in popular reenactments, the aliens from the Travis Walton case were actually a mix of "nordics" (aryan-looking humans) and "cherubim" (bald aliens that look almost like overgrown babies, not with black eyes or gray skin or talons). There are all kinds of super weird reports in the history of UFO folklore, even including things like octopus aliens and tiny little faerie-like humanoids, giants, robots, and even the aforementioned balls of light. Maybe it's a pretty good representation of what's going on in the minds of the public. In India people often see characters from Hindu mythology, and christians around the world often see the virgin Mary.

In the end I think it's more important to make aliens we like because they look cool or have something cool about them. If we can inject some element of realism in there to suspend disbelief, all the better, but sometimes the things that are most convincing are things that never occurred to us based on our own experiences. In one alleged close encounter an abductee described an alien wearing something like a lacey white wedding dress, and the author writing about it commented that in our culture it may mean that, but in their culture that look could be the uniform of an admiral or the president.

In thinking about alien races I came up with an outline for a first contact story where a human meets an alien race that looks like a cross between a maggot and the Pillsbury doughboy, and their language sounds remarkably like a jumble of profanity. I thought it was a great vehicle for humor.

One of the more unusual alien encounters I have heard of happened to a friend's brother. He saw something that he had a very difficult time describing. He said it sounded like a disoriented child with a British accent speaking a foreign language, and that it looked like it was wearing sunglasses in the dark. It was six feet tall standing up, then went on all fours and slinked away rapidly under a nearby pickup truck and was gone. It was seen by several people on that occasion and by others in their community on other occasions. I don't doubt they saw something, but I have no idea what. Whatever it was, it sounds truly alien to me.

Interestingly enough, they saw this thing not too far from where the original goatman sightings happened back in the sixties. People do see weird things there, but I have no idea what they are.

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Tortanick
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Re: Progress as an Artist, Talk About Aliens

#2 Post by Tortanick »

nnnslogan wrote:If you guys don't have any alien races nailed down yet/
We have lots, they're all in the story section and some of them are very creative both culturally and psyically.
nnnslogan wrote:Usually when someone says they want aliens that don't resemble earth creatures or hominids, what you end up with is either some kind of wacky cyborgs (still essentially based on something we're familiar with) or something based on animals from earth to some extent, or you end up with something that looks like a mineral life form, or a ball of light.
That's not a big issue, by mixing and matching different things on earth you can create unique and cool aliens. Take the Gyisache, when explainning (here if your interested) what he based them on them Josh listed the following components:
Josh wrote: Ostrich (overwhelming majority)
Snails (Eyes)
Gecko (Feet)
Sheep (Mouth and Pupils)
the end result looks like this

If you look you can see the various earth influences on them, but the overall effect is reasonably unique, and cool enough so its doesn't matter if you can.
nnnslogan wrote:In the end I think it's more important to make aliens we like because they look cool or have something cool about them. If we can inject some element of realism in there to suspend disbelief, all the better,
Agreed. I'd say its actually very important that you don't break suspension of disbelief, but its not hard to avoid.
nnnslogan wrote: but sometimes the things that are most convincing are things that never occurred to us based on our own experiences.
Weather or not you believe alien abductions happened, there infrequent enough (or memory of them is infrequent enough) that basing alien designs on the real life experiences of abductees wont be any benefit.
nnnslogan wrote:In thinking about alien races I came up with an outline for a first contact story where a human meets an alien race that looks like a cross between a maggot and the Pillsbury doughboy, and their language sounds remarkably like a jumble of profanity. I thought it was a great vehicle for humor.
Feel free to write it up in the story forum, I don't think we've ever had any aliens created as a joke though so it might seem odd among the others. (Personally its not my style of humour)

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pd
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Re: Progress as an Artist, Talk About Aliens

#3 Post by pd »

Please see the Guidelines to Contributing and the Graphics Work page.

Do you have a portfolio or some previous work online somewhere? Are your skills and interests limited to 3D?
Are you going to need textured 3D models in a specific format?
We are using .png for all image files, including textures. The realtime engine is Ogre3D, so we are going to export 3D content using the .mesh format. It makes sense however, to channel all exporting through the same pipeline. So as long as I can import your files in Max, I can do all the exporting.
Will there be in-game support for realtime 3D characters and ships
Ships - yes, characters - possibly, but not until 0.7.
If there will be 3D objects, will there be normals maps or just the standard bump maps?
Normal maps.
What will be the target resolution for polycounts?
Let's just say to keep it reasonable for now. The usual work flow will be to put as many details in highpoly models, as the design requires and then bake those into the normal maps, applied to lowpoly models.

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Josh
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Re: Progress as an Artist, Talk About Aliens

#4 Post by Josh »

pd wrote:Do you have a portfolio or some previous work online somewhere?
Yes, he has another topic on here where he introduced himself, and this is George Edward Purdy's Portfolio

One of the original artists wants to help FO :)

Also, about the Gyisache, I'm not technically done with them. The ones you are seeing are still technically preliminaries.

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shrinkshooter
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Re: Progress as an Artist, Talk About Aliens

#5 Post by shrinkshooter »

Just a short comment to that long page about aliens: I agree with what you're saying. I also agree that humans are for the most part limited to imagining things based off of life experiences, but it can also work the other way around. No matter how alien you try to make something, it inevitably has something in common with some kind of life here on Earth, at least from a human's POV. That's our recognition template, and as it was described above with those "animal parts," once you see an alien you simply see (not in all cases, i guess, but i would say in most) different body parts that belong to different lifeforms you've seen before. Make anything you want to, and I can tell you what it looks like (lizardman, walking crystal, etc).
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