Runescape Concepts – Al Kharid

A few weeks ago we released a Runescape Behind the scenes outlining the imminent update of Al Kharid, one of the oldest areas of the game.

The project is maybe the one I enjoyed the most this year. The challenges we had to face were many, and updating the city without breaking the existing content felt at times like defusing a landmine.
The old Al Kharid looked pretty much like a bunch of scattered houses, and not a city at all.
What we had in mind instead, was a grand place bolstering with activity, a hub for travellers and merchants crossing the desert, with the palace of the Prince at its center.

Given the scale of the project I thought it would have been easier to mock up the entire area in 3D first, to avoid issues down the line. This way I could also have control over the overall shape of the city, how roads and building would lead the players to the points of interest, and most importantly how to convey the feel that the Art Director wanted Al Kharid to have.

It took several days of back and forth to other departments (environment modellers and animators have been heavily involved in the concept phase) before we came up with a layout that could actually work.
Only after everyone was happy with the model (which I forgot to take home, alas)  I could start with the proper drawings.

For the first time in Runescape we built a city with a self consistent logic, with actual city things going on, and a proper city plan.
The houses are now obviously built with materials available in the surrounding area, the crumbly red sandstone the neighbouring hills are made of.
Their walls are bare and scarcely decorated, since the sand and the incessant winds would wear every exposed surface in a matter of days.
The indoors are instead where al Kharidian would spend the most of their time, and are usually rich and full of comforts.
Al Kharid has defensive walls now, to keep away enemies and possibly the harsh weather, and guards patrol the battlements to keep the citizens safe.

Right past the main gate there’s the market, where merchants and travellers sell their wares and exchange news.
The buildings at the outskirts are quite small, while they get taller and taller approaching the palace to emphasise the slope of the hill the city is built on.
This is something that I believe will impress Runescape players quite a bit. There aren’t many high places in the game, and the view from the Prince’s Palace is now quite stunning.

In hindsight, if I were to draw these concepts today I would do a much better job (they’re quite a few months old now). The deadline ended up being quite tight in the end, and I had to take many shortcuts, among which pasting all over the place the facades we had already designed, which gave everything a slightly artificial look.
But hey, I dished out an environment and a half every day so I can’t really complain.

Anyway, I’ll post the rest of the AL Kharid concepts later this week, with the Palace and the rest.

by Paolo Puggioni

Some Runescape Weapons

I was recently allowed to bring home some of the weapons I designed for Runescape, some of which for the Crucible.

The Crucible is one of the latest PvP areas of Runescape.
We released it a few months ago, and as it happened often in the past few months it was a project I was REALLY looking forward to, which I had to abandon after just a couple of concepts to work on something else.

My friend Dave and I worked quite a lot on planning the area so that all the design requirements were met.
The Crucible is a sort of underground arena, set up by rogues on the ruins of a pre-existing ancient dungeon.
We had to convey a certain feeling of danger and uneasiness, make it as cool as possible and at the same time keep the poly count as low as possible because of the massive amount of players playing at the same time.

It took a few days of sketching, planning, and of going back and forth to the various departments of Runescape graphics to double check that our ideas weren’t too crazy.
This is usually one of the parts I like best.
Then, by the time I was ready to start sketching, I had to start working on something else:(

Anyway, I got back to the project just in time to draw a few weapons, so here’s all I’ve got of the Crucible.

The following are instead a couple of weapons (a weapon and a shield actually) I designed for the Runescape MTX shop.

I’ll close with something I remember little about. It’s a Runic Staff, but I’ll be damned if I remember what I did it for:(

Runescape Concepts: Godwars Characters part 2

Here are another couple of Runescape characters I did for the Godwars dungeon.
Now that I think of it, together with Graardor that’s all I did for this project.

Bree and Growler are both Commanders Zyliana’s body guards.

Zylyana has been designed by my good friend Dave, btw.

Commander Zilyana, Keeper of Faith, is the leader of Saradomin’s army in the God Wars Dungeon.
She is an Icyene, an ancient race of winged beings, chosen by Saradomin to guard his hilt.

[Again: source]

Bree, as you might have guessed by the four-legged lower part of his body, is a centaur.
He is one of the only three centaurs of the entire Runescape.
I’m told animators are quite happy of the race being neglected in our game, apparently they’re not the easiest thing to move around.
As far as I’m concerned I’m also quite content to keep their number as low as possible.
Horses are not the easiest thing to draw either, you know.

(Fun fact: artists have been crap at drawing horses in movement until Edweard Muybridge’s first action photos. There was obviously no way to isolate single frames to take reference until then. There’s an article about it on James Gurney’s blog. Oddly enough, being an old time fan of Muybridge’s work, I already knew about these facts. My brain has its own way to decide with information to retain and what not. I can’t remember my own mobile number, for example).

Growler is another one of the three bodyguards.
Apparently he is not much of a threat and Runescape players normally manage to kick all the Life out of him without breaking their stride.

Now, to be fair, at this point I should post the last of Zyliana’s bodyguards, Starlight, but I was so unhappy about the concept that I decided it should remain buried where it is.
As another horse-like creature, this unicorn is not so much to my liking.

The model looks great though.

Some Runescape Characters

A few days ago we released the graphics update of one of the most visited areas in Runescape, the Godwars dungeon.
The area is one of my favourites because of the lore related to it, and because of the massive scale of the battles taking place.

The God Wars were a bloody time marred by battles. Because the land was ever-changing from the constant battles which plagued its surface, there were only a few long-standing cities. Occasionally large camps would be created, but rarely did any significant settlement survive for long.
Because of this, the battles of the God Wars were more violent and bloody than any other. Everyone was pushed to fighting; there were very few “civilians”. The majority of battles were battles held on open land with make-shift defensive structures placed to protect soldiers. While some armies made use of strategy and cunning tactics to overcome their foes, others chose brute force. Followers of Bandos in particular were known for their strength and brutality. Making use of overwhelming numbers, Bandos’s armies took no prisoners.

[source: here]

This is the Behind the scenes, mostly focused on the animations. Too bad there was nothing on the concepts, we did loads of drawings for environments and characters.

Anyway.
As it happens, I would have liked to spend some more time on this project, unfortunately I had to focus on something else and I managed to concept just a few characters while the rest of the team had fun with the rest.
This is General Graardor, one of the big bosses players have to face.

General Graardor is the leader of the army of Bandos within the God Wars Dungeon. He is the last known surviving ourg, a species of powerful ogre-like creatures who were bred by Bandos himself for his armies, and which almost completely died out over the course of numerous wars. With a combat level of 624, General Graardor is the ninth strongest monster in the game.

To make things worse (Graardor is not exactly of the friendly type), the boss comes with three annoying sergeants who try their best to make your life as short and miserable as possible.

I will post some other characters in a couple of days, I could squeeze them all here but the Internet doesn’t like big walls of text:)

The Tree of Life

One of this week’s 2D challenges on CGHub was titled “Tree of Life”.
I came upon it by chance and decided I would give it a try.

It is a known fact amongst artists that painting foliage isn’t easy. Most of them, even great masters of the past, avoid green entirely. At this point I should be mentioning a famous quote by a great painter, but my memory sucks so just take my word for it: painting green isn’t easy and few people like it. As it happens, I’m no exception, and I have issues with it. Sometimes.

The thing is, it’s not just Green. In an environment dense with foliage there are lots of things happening to light and colours. Firstly, light is scattered everywhere, and it changes hue depending on what it runs through or bounces off.
In a canopy, leaves facing up tend to reflect the blue of the sky and lose saturation (assuming they’re beneath a clear patch), leaves tilted towards the ground get more yellows and browns. Some of them are more transparent than others and might get as bright as lanterns if, for example, the sun is directly behind them.
BUT. If they’re thick and the light isn’t strong enough they just get rim light, scattering the beams around to complicate your life even more.

All leaves have the bad habit of casting shadows onto each other, shadows that can take on all sort of tints depending on the colour of the light they generate from, and the colour and value of the leaf they’re cast onto.
Most of them are also quite reflective, and have highlights of all sorts. Those closer to the ground are darker and warmer and usually stand out from the dirt, which is more often than not a pretty low value. Higher leaves are (usually) colder, and the light of the surrounding sky tends to bleed over their edges.
Long story short, drawing leaves is a bitch, at least for me.

This is why I decided to take part in the Tree of Life challenge, I need to practice on green.
I didn’t really do any research into the Tree of Life thing. I just meant to draw a vaguely fantasy-looking tree and see what happened.

Eventually I decided I didn’t need to paint lush vegetation, which I guess is a bit of a failure considering the reason why I decided to paint a tree in the first place.
However, leaves in this case would have distracted from the main focal point of the composition (the big ball of branches with the mystical fairy light in the middle), so I’ll have to postpone my practice on leaves to some other time.
Lots of green here, though.

For the time being, here’s what I came up with.

And here’s the process as usual.

If you want to know more about painting foliage, there’s a number of awesome posts about it on James Gurney’s blog (there’s a list of links to other related posts at the end of his entry).

Cerberus

According to Roman and Greek mythology Cerberus was one of the guardians of the Underworld.
Most times described as a massive three headed dog, over time its myth took many, more extravagant shapes.

Cerberus was a vicious beast that guarded the entrance to Hades and kept the living from entering the world of the dead. According to Apollodorus, Cerberus was a strange mixture of creatures: he had three heads of wild dogs, a dragon or serpent for a tail, and heads of snakes all over his back. Hesiod, though, says that Cerberus had fifty heads and devoured raw flesh.
(Source)

As it often happens when I draw stuff for fun at home, I hadn’t exactly planned ahead.
I started with a muddy, greenish background, vaguely reminiscent of an Underworld environment, and put a big shape in it. Then I thought “hey, it could be a three headed dog guarding something”, and went down that road.

I always thought Cerberus was one of the most under-appreciated monsters of the entire Greek mythology.
He had a pretty important duty: keeping souls from escaping the hell they were confined into. I’m sure all living beings should be grateful for his efforts, lest having to share their vital space with rotting, slightly upset undeads.
Ok, he would also enthusiastically maul anyone trying to enter Hades, but I’m sure it was more likely the other way round.
I really can’t sympathise with all the heroes who kept bothering him just to prove a point.

Anyway, after a few minutes of research I decided I couldn’t be bothered to include the entire bunch of Apollodorus’ zoo into its body, but I quite liked the many legged Cerberus in front of the Royal Institute Technology of Stockholm, so I took that as a reference.
The human character came almost as an afterthought, just to set the scale, and I didn’t know what it would have been until the very end.

For some reason I eventually went for a vaguely Norse-hero-look. The two myths don’t have anything to do with each other, but anything even vaguely Scandinavian looks automatically heroic, so in a sense it fits.
Who else other than a mindless hero would challenge anything that big?
Anyway, animated gif of the process to follow.

Runescape Behind The Scenes: The New Al-Kharid

This week’s Runescape Behind The Scenes is about one of the projects I’ve enjoyed the most this year: the update of Al-Kharid, one of the oldest cities in the Runescape world map.
The reason I’m so fond of this city is that it’s one of the few projects I worked on recently that I can really feel “mine”.
My current duties keep me away from my Wacom more often than not, whereas for this update I actually managed to get my hands dirty with quite a bunch of concepts.

I haven’t been able to post them yet, you can see a few of them in this video.
The big ugly face speaking with a strong Joe Pesci accent is my own.

Building over the old environment was a bitch (well-spoken people would say “a challenge”). The fun kind of challenge though.
Thing is, the place was old, like painfully old, and the common feeling in the Runescape Graphics Team was to bulldoze the place and build a shiny new city over its smouldering ruins.
Obviously this couldn’t be done, Al-Kharid is full of content, quests and things to do, and players wouldn’t have been happy had we been too drastic. So what we did instead was tiptoe around the untouchable bits, keep the important ones in their place and design pretty things on the rest.

We soon found out that designing an entire city almost from scratch offered some interesting possibilities. We could control how players would approach it, what they could see first, where to lead their eye, what feelings we could convey and why.
We could also follow a logic, some sort of real life city-plan, something difficult to do when you’re working on an established environment you’re adding new bits to.

Al-Kharid is now obviously built with materials available in the surrounding area, the crumbly red sand-stone mined from the hills.
The buildings are bare and poorly decorated, as the incessant winds and sands would erode any exposed surface in just days.
Moreover, the unbearable heat would more likely keep al-kharidians indoors, which is where they show their love for beauty, precious materials and colours.

In order to have all the elements working together I had to mock up the city in 3D first (I’ll post some Sketchup models soon) and constantly check with modellers and animators that everything was in good order.
Oddly enough this was the fun part. I spent more than a week talking to people in other departments and making sure my ideas were feasible, before I could even think of drawing a line. Ideas came to other people, advice was given, suggestions were made and only after did the concepts come. There was a “good energy”, if you forgive me the vaguely New-Age term, and I think it’s reflected by the quality of the environment we made.

It took more than a month for the entire Runescape Concept Artists team to design the place. I worked mostly on the city footprint and the environments, the others made all the characters, the indoors and the throng of props that populate the area.
Modellers were so quick at building the place that we could barely keep up with them, nonetheless it took some time.
It was a massive effort and I can’t wait for players to see it. Hopefully I’ll be able to post some of the environment concepts shortly.

Lionability, a Lion Woman Character

I just finished this illustration for a friend, it’s some kind of lion woman, as the name suggests.

The character is actually a portrait of my friend’s daughter and it’s supposed to look pretty much like her, which thing scared me quite a bit.
A part from very carefully selected exceptions, I never, ever work for friends or family. This is something I learned after many painful experiences, and I’m pretty sure every freelance illustrator has a good deal of anecdotes to support my policy.
This is like RULE NUMBER ONE.

Once I made a wall painting for a friend of mine.
Sticking to any sort of composition ended up being an impossible task, as he kept on insisting on pointless, impossible details he wanted to add along the way.
“Can you draw a bunch of mossy stones there? A parrot would look nice on that tree. Can I have a waterfall? And now can you add a squirrel?
That was enough. “I already made two!”
“Oh? I can’t see them”
“They’re behind the tree! If you squint you can see the shadow of a tail”.
“Oh cool thanks”
I got away with the invisible squirrels, but that was when I came up with RULE NUMBER ONE.

Another time I was commissioned a portrait by my uncle’s second wife (ok, she’s technically my aunt, but I’d rather refer to her as my uncle’s second wife).
Anyway. She has what can only be defined as a massive nose. Or, if you want to put it some other way, her face is way smaller than it should be compared to her nose.
I tried to downplay it a bit because I know she has a problem with it, only to have her complain about how it was disproportionally big.
“Actually, uncle’s second wife, I made it.. oh forget it, I’ll make it smaller”.
I went through a large number of revisions before we agreed on a size she was happy with, only to find out that the face I painted was nothing like hers.
OH REALLY? THIS IS SOMEONE ELSE’S NOSE, UNCLE’S SECOND WIFE!

Which lead me to RULE NUMBER TWO: no portraits.
People tend not to be happy about their physical appearance, and you never know which wrinkle they would like to smooth and which other detail they would find offensive if drawn accurately.

So, this time I was asked to break BOTH RULES, at the same time.
However, my friend is a freelance herself, and I’m sure she knows the rules better than I do.
And her daughter is quite pretty, so there was no feature I had to awkwardly tiptoe around.
This time I was happy to accept.

I don’t know much about the background story of this character, only that she’s some kind of lion woman.
Plus, obviously, the details she had to have.
As expected, the painting went smoothly, my friend agreed on everything I proposed, and the changes she asked made sense and improved the final result.
Plus the real-life lion woman was happy with it, so hey, I guess this proves that rules can have exceptions.

Sketches at The Royal College of Surgeons

Today my fellow Concept Artists and I went to draw some sketches at the Hunterian Museum of Surgeons in London.

Every time I go to a museum with the precise intention of drawing there’s something that prevents me from doing it.
A couple of times it was the throng of people loitering in front of the exhibits, another time I had to run back home to sort some things out, this time I’ve just been silly.
Today I spent most of the time looking at the hundreds of specimens preserved in formaldehyde telling to myself “whoa, I’ll totally come back later to draw this”.
I never did. I mean, the Museum of Surgeons is really cool, I just got lost in contemplation.

When I realised it was time to catch the train home, I had managed to draw just a couple of sketches on my pocket PaperBlank and one on my bigger watercolour sketch pad.

For some reasons today I had a thing with skeletons.

A human skull and a squid.

A bird of some kind.

A Penguin.

I totally failed to draw any of the most interesting specimens.
John Hunter (1728-1793), founder of the museum, was an avid collector, and aside from taking most of the samples himself he also travelled all across the world to buy the rarest items available at the time.
Amongst the most interesting there was the skeleton of a GIGANTIC Irishman (about 2.30m tall), a hydrocephalus skull and a calf with its head growing inside its ribcage.

Ok, it wasn’t a collection of deformities, these were just the most interesting ones under a Concept Artist’s point of view.
There’s just so much you can do trying to make a bladder under formaldehyde to fit into a video game.

Talking about things to sketch in a museum, while there we also found out that there’s a wonderful exhibition, Animal Inside Out, going on at the Natural History Museum until the 16th of September.

The exhibits in Animal Inside Out are preserved using ‘plastination’ by the team behind Gunther von Hagens’s famous Body Worlds exhibition.
I saw von Hagen’s Body World in Vancouver in 2010, this one seems as interesting without being as creepy, I wonder how my 5 years old daughter would like it.

by Paolo Puggioni

Sculpting with ZBrush

Despite being pretty mediocre at anything involving 3D, I recently decided to start the slow and painful process of learning how to sculpt with ZBrush.

Now, I had my first computer around 30 years ago, I have at least a basic knowledge of every 2D and 3D software worth mentioning, and I consider myself not completely dumb.
After about 30 minutes of pointless clicking around, I finally figured out that there’s NOTHING you can do with ZBrush out of mere intuition.
Not a sphere, a cube, not even opening a bloody template file. Nothing. I seemed like a monkey trying to put together an Ikea bunk bed.

The thing is, ZBrush’s interface seems to be specifically designed to make beginners feel stupid.
Common commands are buried under submenus with creative names, buttons are scattered around in no apparent order, everything is chaos.
I love it.
But trust me, find a bloody tutorial from day one and just follow it, there isn’t a single thing that ZBrush does like other softwares, not even zooming in and out (keep ALT pressed, click, release ALT while keeping clicked down, drag up or down. Really?).

However, after some proper training, your muscle memory will kick in, tasks that seemed impossible become second nature and you’ll finally find out that ZBrush is real fun.
I will never bother with proper 3D-people’s stuff (normal maps and things like that). But I’ll definitely use it to support my future efforts in painting.
ZSPheres and ZSketch are powerful tools to create maquettes and study scenes with multiple figures in just minutes.

Plus, sculpting forces you to be ACCURATE with shapes and volumes. Messing up a muscle or a proportion becomes depressingly apparent on a 3D model, so I have to be particularly careful with anatomy.
Below there’s the result of my last tutorial.

She’s a bit muscular, I haven’t polished her skin and well, no breasts or face yet. But everything else should be in order.
I think I finally learned what happens between shoulder blades and deltoids, for example, and also around armpits, ribs and latissimus dorsi.
I’ve always had problems drawing those areas.

Basically ZBrush can make you better at drawing, once you get past the BIG barrier of its interface.
Hopefully I’ll be able to use it a a tool to draw more interesting things pretty soon.
It has a steep learning curve and it requires time.
I would recommend it as a past-time if you’re home alone because your family is on holiday, for example. And you’ve already finished every quest in Skyrim worth playing, and you’re too old to party like twenty-five-years-old-you would have done if home alone.
Oh well.