Runescape Update – The Chaos Tunnels

Last Week we updated a pretty old Runescape area, the Chaos Tunnels.
The update also included the Brimhaven Dungeon, the Fremennik Slayer Dungeon and the Taverley Dungeon.

Beneath the southern areas of theWilderness, north of Varrock is a warren of caves, linked by mysterious portals. Delved from the rock by the power of chaotic magic, a strange enchantment holds sway over its tunnels and passages, drawing evil to it like a moth to a flame. For this reason, perhaps, the range of creatures within the Chaos Tunnels is far greater than you might expect.

Whatever its origin, it is certain that the caves are tainted by the dark hands of Zamorakian magic…

The Concept Artists Team worked on this whole bunch of environments (plus an awful amount of things yet to be released) pretty much at the same time, early this year.
Each one of us worked on a separate dungeon, so of course I’ll be posting only the artwork I’m responsible of. But you can find more in my friend and colleague’s website.

I was supposed to work on more underground areas as well, then I had to move to the Al Kharid rework, which took me quite some time.

Here’s a video of the environments in game.
Btw, No offence to the Runescape fan who posted it but I had to silence the music. Not my cup of tea:)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W_FZo1IjaA

The environments look nice in game. However, as you might have noticed I had designed the floors with a more irregular, uneven look.
I hate flat surfaces, If I could have things my own way I’d change Runescape into some kind of Roller Coaster.
However, steps and cracks on the floor are quite polygon expensive, and modellers often have to even things out to prevent the FPS from being unhappy.
This Dungeon is visited by many players at the same time, so I guess that was one of those cases.

The NPC are still quite dated. We’ll take care of them at some point!

by Paolo Puggioni

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:(

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).

A Dragon Hunting Sheep

After some struggle I finally managed to finish the dragon I sketched a couple of weeks ago.
This one has been a bitch. I made a first coloured version, and it sucked. The face of the dragon was awful, the colours were all wrong, the composition was meh.
So I did what every decent artist does when their work is unsatisfying: I moved the drawing to the trash and I started from scratch.

I’m quite happy about this last one, even though there are still quite a few things I would do differently if I could go back in time.
For a start, his head could be more tilted sideways to avoid breaking his teeth against the ground while dropping on the first sheep at full speed.
I meant to give him a flat under-throat, like a crocodile’s, to emphasise this. Then I ended up with something closer to a pelican pouch, which after all makes sense for a big predator used to swallow whole sheep three at a time.
I’m not sure whether this last solution works better or not. If this were a paid commission I’d draw two versions just to make sure.
Anyway.

The other thing I’m not entirely happy with is his body. The middle section doesn’t follow the curve suggested by the tail, or at least it does it only partially.
The dragon is supposed to make a sharp turn around the top of the hill and then drop on the sheep. Maybe his body could be more twisted?
Again, I would experiment more if this were proper work. Thing is, other ideas sprang to mind while I was working on this, and I just wanted to move on to the next one.

For the environment I took inspiration from the peaks in West Yorkshire, where I lived for a few years.

Those barren, dull-green hills under that constantly grey sky.
The reign of diffuse, unsaturated light, with the occasional, enterprising beam trying to pierce resilient clouds always heavy with rain. Often unsuccessfully.
I thought it would have been the right background for a dragon, especially because that beam of light would have been useful to put the focal point under some kind of spotlight.

Plus, I didn’t mean to draw the magical/smart/ancient/wise/treasure-hoarder kind of dragon. This one is more of a predator with just the basic instincts of flying and hunting.
The Peak District seemed to me quite appropriate for this kind of scenario.
Hills, sheep, savage nature and rain. And a dragon looming over all this.

Image with the process below.

by Paolo Puggioni

King Robert

Green Ronin has just released its update to A Song of Ice and Fire Campaign Guide, another Game of Thrones RPG Rulebook I’ve worked on.
This is King Robert Baratheon, after the Battle of the Trident events which led to his ascent to the Iron Throne.

I could have depicted him in many ways.
Robert was as quick to laughter as he was to rage, he was bold and charming, and the most fearsome warrior of his times.
As a character he could have been suited well both holding a horn of ale or bored to death while attending to one of the kingly duties he loathed so much.
He seemed to enjoy just the idea of being a king, but not so much all the responsibilities that came with the position.

For this particular illustration I chose to see him already ahead in his life, aged by the burdens of the Iron Throne, the intrigues of his court and the excesses he was used to.
According to the Game of Thrones books, he couldn’t fit into his old armour any more. However, I figured he would love to wear some battle garments here and there, as a reminder of how he was.

Unfortunately by the time they offered me the assignment I was already working on something else, so I could only accept a limited amount of illustrations.

Which sucks, because the characters for this assignment were all pretty cool, and I enjoyed the job quite a lot.
Also, I had just finished reading the second book of the Game of Thrones series, and I had their faces (or how my mind imagined them) still vivid in my mind.

I’ll post some more characters in the next few days.
And I’ll stay by the door waiting for the postman to deliver my second big shiny book🙂

by Paolo Puggioni

Lannister Archers

This is the last one I’ve been allowed to post from the Game of Thrones Illustrations I made for Green Ronin’s RPG.
It’s also my least favourite of the bunch, if I could go back I’d paint the faces of the archers from scratch.

The ones I prefer are in the second batch, which I’ll publish in a few months.
Thanks again to Green Ronin for allowing me to post all this artwork so soon.
Not to mention the fact that the Game of Thrones series has been the best thing I’ve read in the last few years, which thing makes the whole assignment unbelievably cool.

by Paolo Puggioni

The Stone

This is the first environment I painted in a long while.
I had been drawing characters for a few months and I kind of needed some relaxing, loose painting to work on.

I did this without nothing particular in mind, so well, you can;t find a story in it.
If you have a look at the process I’m posting below you’ll also notice I overlaid some textures pretty soon, then I painted over them, then I added some other textures, then I painted over those as well.

Not exactly the canonical approach, but what the hell, I have been watching series through out the entire process, this was just for the sake of painting.
Hence the highly creative name I managed to find for this city carved in the stone.

by Paolo Puggioni

Song of Ice and Fire Artwork: A Thief And An Ironman

Some other artwork I made for the Game Of Thrones RPG

The first one is a classic of Fantasy Art: a thief doing thief things on a lock.
For some reason I choose a more “painty” approach with this. Unfortunately the composition is not as it had been planned at the beginning: the layout had to be turned from landscape to portrait after it was already finished and I’m not entirely happy with it now.

The other depicts a class of characters peculiar to the Game Of Thrones books.
Ironmen are fierce people from barren islands ravaged by storms. They are fearless warriors, sailors and pirates, playing at throwing axes at each other when they’re not pillaging coastal settlements.

When I made this I hadn’t read as much about them as I have now.
I would probably draw them differently now, this one looks a lot like a Viking, with not enough of their unique details.

by Paolo Puggioni

Catelyn Stark

Another drawing from the first set I made for the Game Of Thrones RPG.
This one was was quite hard, I have to confess I have some troubles at drawing horses.
Horses have stupid legs, full of knees!

The Catelyn I depicted here is not the same you see in the Game of Thrones books, or in the series.
She is young here, not yet married to Ned Stark, her face void of all the troubles she would face in the future.
Or, well, of all the prodigies I can’t spoil!

For some reasons I set the scene in a snowy landscape, thinking of Winterfell rather than Riverrun, where Catelyn would likely have been during her youth.
However, despite Riverrun being further south, it gets some snow every now and then, so I figure it doesn’t really matter.
Neither the Art Director at Green Ronin nor George R.R. Martin complained about it, so here she is.

by Paolo Puggioni