The Art Fundamentals within Materials
They are everywhere
The fundamentals of art are everywhere we look. Its within our cell phone designs, the random clutter on our sidewalks, and the ornate icing décor adorning multi-layered cakes on The Great British Bake Off. Art exists in our lives and it can impact us and how we perceive daily life. Have you ever looked at a red sports car and become a little annoyed? How about that uncomfortable twinge when walking under a dark overpass? Color, shape, proportions, value, it all affects us in some way in daily life.
One such example of art existing under the surface is one of my dad’s hobbies. My father likes to keep a tidy lawn. For four months out of the year, it is green as can be with not a single dandelion in sight. The grass is short, vibrant, and maintained to near perfection. This style of lawn is a showcase of how the fundamentals of art play a role in how we and those around us perceive the world. In America, green is often associated with the color of money. One look at my father’s lawn and a thought may pop up; “this lawn is very healthy; he must spend a lot of money to maintain it”.
I assure you, he does not.
It continues, with the perfect order that the lawn maintains with not a dandelion in sight. My dad puts a lot of effort into pulling weeds throughout the year, and the order and cleanliness of the grass reflects that part of him. The same is true of long grass or short grass. When I see a lawn with long grass, I may think “this person doesn’t care about their property”. That is likely false, but long blades look unsightly and project an illusion of disorder. Long grass is for the wild, laws are meant to be maintained.
Of course, I live in a city with no lawn to speak of.
The example of lawns is but one instance of how the subconscious language of art and design fundamentals play a role in our daily lives, and in how we perceive the world. When we build materials for a game, animation, or even just for fun, we need to integrate this type of thought process into our works.
Why is the most important word
Art Fundamentals receive prominent placement on a variety of channels on YouTube, and for good reason. You would be surprised at the number of artists from all levels of skill and walks of life who find they are lacking in some aspect of their understanding of art, myself included. Depending on your favorite online personalities, you will hear a variety of blame passed around, from Art Schools to 4 Year Colleges to a lack of overall Arts Education in public schooling, and more. It’s an issue that seems to resonate deeply, particularly here in the states.
Even with the proper schooling and practice of traditional and digital artistry, conscious intent is important when creating a model, sculpt, or texture. Reliance on what is known as “the eye” is important when following reference, but what takes your work to unparalleled heights is the “why”. Why am I placing pebbles down the middle of this material? Why is my character’s left shoulder slightly smaller than the right? How did this small pond get here? On a more granular level, why am I adding an edge loop? Why am I using a Gradient Map node? Why the hPolish brush?
Why am I doing what I am?
It’s not that it’s easy to rely solely upon your observational skills to create an art piece, but that it’s easy to forget the ‘why’.
That ‘why’ quite often can be traced back to the practice and understanding of art fundamentals. Or, perhaps, the lack there of.
The Fundamentals of Art, for Material Artists
Working in Substance Designer, Quixel Mixer, or another tool (any takers for Photoshop) can make it seem as if the idea of shape, value, and composition don’t apply to materials. “I’m making materials that are going to be mixed with other materials” one might think, or “dirt is just a few noises on a few other noises with a brown color”. It’s even possible, and I’ve absolutely done it, to stumble into a very realistic material without understanding exactly what you did artistically.
Taking time to follow tutorials that aid in understanding the tool and building an understanding of how it works are extremely important. However, there comes a time when one needs to expand their expertise to using the tool in conjunction with their understanding of the elements of art, facilitating the opportunity to make something truly special.
Below is a simplified list of art fundamentals as it relates to material work. This is not comprehensive and is only an opinion. With each definition, I have included an example of how it can be used or created within Substance Designer, the primary tool we use here at GameTextures. Let me be clear, however, that these techniques and thoughts can be used across tools; implementations may be different but the end goal and theory is all the same.
It’s like going from Max to Blender! Sorta.
Shapes and Forms
- 2D and 3D guides to more complex objects
-Shapes include square, triangle, circle
-Primary forms include sphere, cube, cylinder, cone
-Any complex shape or form can be broken down into a combination of simpler shapes or forms
-Substance Designer: using a single or variety of shape notes to create a complex looking object, like a stone or a twig
Value
-Range of light to dark in an image
-Value can have a bigger impact on an image or material than color
-Value Scheme: a plan for how value will read in an image or scene
-Darker values down by the ground, becoming lighter the closer to the sky
-Helps with overall readability
- Substance Designer: Using derived maps (curvature, cavity) and noises to add variation and depth to a material while keeping the color inputs to a minimum
Color Theory
-Using colors to create pleasing compositions or to mimic nature depending on what is required
-Common Color Schemes:
-Monochrome: Single color, look is derived though vibrance and value
-Analogous: 4 colors in a straight line on the color wheel. Can have a consistent tone and harmonious look
-Complimentary: Colors opposite of another on the wheel. Heavy contrast.
-Relative color: Optical illusion where one color appears as a different color based on surrounding colors
-Substance Designer: Choosing colors that, when not matching reference, are rooted in a common color scheme instead of being random
Composition
-Rule of Thirds: Framing the focus of a scene into a third of a 3x3 grid
-Eye Rest: areas in an image where there is little detail, reducing information overload
-Leading lines or shapes: lines or shapes that guide the eyes of the viewer though the image
-Symmetry and Patterns: repeating elements or patterns
— Useful to be aware of when creating materials that will tile
— Often want to avoid too many repeating elements that create an obvious pattern
-Substance Designer: Deciding where to place areas of high or low detail in a material while focusing on reducing obvious tiling or highlighting elements that repeat
A lot of the ideas and notes above have been informed by the Art Fundamentals video series by Swatches, a YouTube Channel run by freelance illustrator Clint Cearley, who’s contributed to Magic The Gathering on an ongoing basis. I found his videos to be educational and suggest them to all artists who want to improve their artistic foundation. It’s not a replacement for proper study and education, but if you need to jog your memory, it’s perfect.
Side Story
It may come as a surprise to many that I, a Digital Media Professor and industry professional with over half a dozen shipped games, was generally unaware of the art fundamentals. I had an inkling of what they were and the idea of how they functioned, but I was not conscious of them in my work. From my time creating environments that looked like miniature sets in college to my production work at WB Games, and even to a degree when I started working at Bluepoint on Shadow of The Colossus, I didn’t consider how the work I did related to the fundamentals of what makes good art. I was often a machine, working on my given task or tasks producing an asset for use in a game. I loved what I was doing and I wanted my creation to look great, but I wasn’t concerned with its shape being consistent with the overall shape language across the game world, or with making sure it didn’t have a value range that made the asset blend into other parts of the scene.
Leads just needed to tell me what to do, and I did it. It’s not that I didn’t care, I made most assets look good, but I didn’t understand why.
This type of approach, as unintentional as it was, worked for a time. It worked because there was either an established visual guide or reference, pre-existing assets I could compare against, or I just got lucky. Luck does not last forever though and my time at WB, where my art skills and lack of knowledge eventually caught up with me (along with some other things), was cut short.
I would not start to understand the artistry behind my creative work until I was at Bluepoint, where my proximity to my art director and his influences started to spark curiosity in me. When I returned from Texas and eventually landed at Dreamline, working with the talented team and my Creative Director there started to get me to think about color, composition, and patterns as elements of my work. As I approached my last few months at Dreamline, I had realized that I was limited by my lack of understanding the fundamentals of art and decided to find a way to make it more of a focus.
How did I navigate an artistic field without really understanding the underlying concepts? I managed because of two things; an understanding of the technology and technical aspects of creating game art, and what is called the “artistic eye”.
The artistic eye is a simple concept to grasp. Artists can see and re-create a work that looks good to casual observers because they have a ‘gut feeling’ or ‘instinct’ about what does or does not look good. Artists who rely on the eye alone develop work, like myself, may develop that talent though self-taught methods. In my case, I did not take an art class until I was a senior in high school, so much of the art that formed my fundamental experience creating was self-taught by tracing or by mimicking my more talented friend. I focused on 3D in college, at the expense of my fundamental skill sets. While I have an Art Minor, the reality of that Minor was that I took two fairly simple introductory studio classes and a single art history class, not enough course work to crack a 20 something’s fairly thick skull.
For some, that will be enough. For myself, I did not really understand how to absorb the information I was given. That process would come much later. Thankfully, it is never too late to improve.
Simplified, Practical Example
Now that we’ve gone over some of the fundamentals of art and how they can be applied specifically to materials, lets dive into a fairly high level and generalized practical example. Below, I selected a photo I took during a recent vacation. It will serve as an example for a ground material one may be asked to create, be it in Substance Designer or in another program like Zbrush. Programs don’t matter nearly as much as understanding what you are trying to create.
Here, we see a dry ground with a lot of exposed rock and stone. The variety of the dirt types and dead grass coverage makes this an excellent texture for walking paths in a forest…which is exactly where I took this image.
Let’s break it down:
1. First, we have do decide what will and will not be in the texture. Each game project will have it’s own requirement based on a multitude of factors like target resolution and genre. For instance the Final Fantasy VII: Remake had artists bake indents or protrusions into the low poly only if it was 5 cm or smaller. We’re going to be more generous and plan that anything that’s about 10 cm high or smaller will be built into the texture. Anything larger than 10 cm will be a separate model.
2. Next, we should define the large shapes that will be in our material. Here, we’re looking at the smaller rocks and anything that doesn’t protrude more than 10 cm from the ground. It is worth considering how the shapes we create can be re-used and remixed within in our material. We might want to focus on only 3–4 base shapes and consider reusing or combining them later.
3. Along the same lines, we can create 3–5 types of dead pine, straw, and grass blades. This will make up the dead foliage that has collected on the pathway.
4. We can wrap this stage up with anything else we find missing, like small pebbles (potentially based on the other rock shapes) and leaves.
Now we can start creating the basis of our material, the height map.
1. With our base set of shapes chosen, we can build them in whatever tool we prefer. We’ll place after.
2. While we can place our shapes into a black void now, I prefer to have some degree of the ground built up. Let’s focus on the dirt first.
2a. A common error is to think that a noise pattern is all you need for dirt. At the very least, mixing the noise with other noises and grunge patterns will get you something semi-unique (at least in Designer). More accurately, it’s worth noticing how the different dirt layers are formed, and then blended.
The white dirt appears to look closer to fine pebbles or even sand. It’s probably represented better by a modified Alveolus generator instead of a generic noise, while the brown dirt is more in line with mixing dirt generators together.
2b. Once you have these two elements built, blend them. The blend is both random and determined though interactions with wind and humans. Early on, it can be helpful to use a simple blend as a place holder if using Designer. This allows for easier testing of techniques, patterns, and colors. Designer makes it easy for us to come back around and edit our blends later to better match our reference.
3. Now is a fine time to place our large rock shapes. If using Substance, the Height Blend node will work wonders for dialing in how much the rocks will appear above the dirt. Be aware of the rock density as well, these large shapes both follow a pattern AND do not litter the entire material (remember, we have meshes for the biggest shapes).
5. Here we can add in our remaining dead foliage coverage. It’s important to use it to blend your rock shapes in with the dirt, as well as to use it on it’s own. Be mindful of patterns that repeat, you want to keep them to a minimum so the texture tiles well.
Congratulations! You’ve now taken the time to breakdown reference to individual parts and reconstructed it for your art! There is still a lot of work left, but the fundamental design and shape language of your material should be in a pretty usable state.
There is one additional element I’d like to speak to when it comes to creating materials, and that is to not forget value ranges. In some earlier Designer based Materials of mine, I often leaned on a multitude of Uniform Color nodes to get a lot of the color detail I was looking for. This is not necessarily wrong, especially if your material is complex. I have found in my own work that value shifts can produce very similar results, making your materials a little easier to edit or work with. Sampling your reference and using it as a grayscale gradient can be a start when looking to add natural looking value ranges to your material, and you can further add subtle high frequency detail though converting your normal map to various other node types (this can also be done though filters in Photoshop). One needs to be careful that you are truly adding value and not highlights or shadows to your material when doing this, as it can be confusing at times to distinguish between shadow, highlights, and value shifts.
Pro Tip: When sampling color from an image, try using Photoshop to do a light removal. It’ll be a bit truer to the different values in the image instead of including any highlights or shadows.
The Importance of Technicians
All digital art has some degree of technicality to it. Animations are made with rigs what must be built by an artist who specializes in rigging. Compositors know how to combine seemingly random and unrelated video, audio, and 3D elements to create something new and fully unique. Pixel artists can manipulate individual pixels to facilitate an animated or scrolling 2D background or character.
3D Game Artists know how to create richly detailed works of art that can be rendered to a screen 30, 60, 90, or even 120 times a second from every conceivable angle.
Being a game artist requires technical knowledge. Without knowing how to properly transfer details from richly detailed sculpts or scans to a low resolution game asset, or how to utilize various UV workflows and texture creation methods to reduce callbacks to a CPU, you cannot be an effective game artist. While it’s true that current PC’s and the latest Xbox and PlayStation consoles are extremely powerful, it is NOT difficult to bring any powerful machine to its knees if a team does not develop efficient artwork.
My career, windy and strange as it has been, has continued primarily due to my technician abilities. I came up during the end of the PS3/Xbox 360 era and shipped my first game on the PlayStation Vita before moving over to MMO development on a legacy toolset. My art may have been inconsistent in quality, but my assets usually always ran without a hitch. Technical limitations became fun for a bit, as I would have to figure out how to push detail while being conscious about my UV count (that is NOT a typo). As I shifted to freelance and absorbed feedback from a former coworker, I grew my understanding about shading and texture art as well. I was fortunate that grasping technical content was easy for me, and corrections to misunderstood concepts was swift. Freelance work eventually let me live on the cutting edge of Unreal Engine usage and file type support, and it was enough for me to snare a few big gigs along the way.
Game development is also an artistic endeavor, requiring an understanding of art fundamentals as well as the skill to put that knowledge to good use. Furthermore, making game art is a career, a job, and a stage in the production pipeline. You can be a terrific artist, but if you can’t create an asset in a timely manner, your utility will be limited in a studio environment. The other side of the coin is true too, you can also be a fast artist, but if the quality is suspect then your utility is limited.
This is where I have faltered from time to time. My art skills require a lot practice and refinement. In the past, I did not know how to focus my efforts to improve, it was mostly just “make more stuff”. Today, the struggle is about finding time and energy to practice. Working from home during the Pandemic has helped at times, and hurt at others.
It’s easy to forget the importance of being well rounded in your chosen discipline. Know how the art you create is going to be used. Know limitations of the tools, technology, or platform, tailor your art around those limitations. Learn how frame rates work and if your platform is better at one or two specific tasks, especially when developing for a lower end platform like a phone or standalone VR headset. Don’t forget to also practice your art often. Go back to the basics and draw, color, sculpt, or paint, all by hand. Get better at using the different bushes or tools in your favorite programs and look for new ways to build old things.
Artistic careers are difficult, but it can be easier to navigate through the melding of classical art fundamentals and modern technical understanding.
And now you can too!
As we close out 2020, I would like to personally share what I used over the summer as my framework for artistic self-improvement. I spent the majority of the summer developing a small Unreal Engine based Top Down Shooter Prototype. I had a blast, and while the game is deeply flawed, it was an invaluable experience. As part of my summer, I also took the time to practice art almost every weekday, typically though a return to sketching or sculpting in Zbrush. Toward the end of the summer, it also moved to re-creating materials in Substance.
I found it invaluable during my break, and I plan to return some version of this approach to my daily routine in the new year. If you find yourself struggling with the art side of things like I do, I hope the following outline helps. I must credit the YouTuber YanSculpts for the framework, it is in this video:
-After waking up, take a walk, exercise, or do some other activity. This gets blood moving and can help settle your mind a bit.
-Try to be in a distraction free environment. Noise cancelling headphones help me a ton.
-After, take at least an hour and find an object to study. Focus on recreating it from observation. If time allows, attempt to re-create a second version from memory. Compare the two and note the differences. The focus is on studying the perspective and underlying shapes and forms of your subject. Additionally, focus on what you are attempting to improve, whether it’s as simple as studying reference, or as complex as how you crosshatch shadows on complex sketches.
-Critique your work, note what you could have done better
-Do not focus on quality, focus on output and strategically and surgically improving your weaknesses.
-Optionally, post what you have done. I did, and I hated half of my work: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/48bbX8
I often ran short on time because I wanted to be working on my prototype by 10 am, but even with my truncated timeframe I felt that I improved as I kept working.
Practicing art is all about the act of finding a reference and creating. If you struggle on the technical side, or perhaps are not sure where to start, I often turn to reading. My most recent technical and artistic struggle is lighting. My lighting skills are mixed, and with PBR, HDR, and physically accurate lights being in use now, I struggle with balancing real-world values and renders that look pleasing. It’s though addressing this struggle that I have found Joey Lenz’s website, https://www.polyplant.co/tech-art-portfolio.html. It has been a phenomenal resource for me. His work singlehandedly improved my Unreal Engine output while at Dreamline. I’m still struggling on some technical aspects of lighting, but I keep coming back to this page over and over to fill in that knowledge.
Happy holidays to all! May we all keep improving our work together, enjoy some holiday cheer (as best as possible) and look forward to a phenomenal 2021.
