I don’t remember a time when I did not love to create. In the beginning, it was drawing. The pictures I made depicted the standard array of scenery your brain finds awe inspiring at a young age. No pretensions about the subject matter here: Star Wars, superheroes, miscellaneous alien landscapes, and epic battles. The only point to note about my art at that age might be..

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What’s happened is people who go into this field get sucked up so quickly they haven’t learned to observe, or maybe they haven’t had time to. And, at the same time, in the gaming industry they don’t have the hardware or software to make stuff look real yet. They’re getting closer, though.

I managed to get a good friend of mine, Victor, to share with us his ideas, workflows as well as some of his thoughts regarding the CG and videogames industry.

Enjoy!

*Tell us a bit more about yourself

Hello, my name is Victor Santaquiteria, and I was born 22 years ago in the northern part of Spain.

I worked in the CG-Architecture industry for a while and after doing some freelancing I turned into the video games world, which along with film and literature, has always been a steady inspiration source for me since I was a small kid. Currently I’m working as a character artist for Sony/Guerrilla-Games.

*You have a very distinct style to your artworks, can you share with us your thought process?

I think each artist acquires if not the forced imposition, at least the reasonable compromise of developing be it ideas, design statements or even both, that are truly unique.Either from personal experiences, or else by being educated enough on the work product of other artists experiences, so that a transformation into something new may occur.

Then my own personal thought process is only as remarkable as is my own and personal, this is part of an individuall adventure that I don’t dare spoil for anyone.

Of course I dissect my own work and that of others to improve my craft, but beyond technical training, imitation does little else aside from devaluating the original.
So if you really like work that feels original and fresh, as I do, the best way to contribuite to it is to make innovation the value that defines your very own work.

Lets leave the orcs alone, please!

* What about some insights on your sculpting process?

To reproduce my technical, slightly hectic and conceptless method, product of yet undeveloped pencil sketching skills, you will need:

A model, preferably CG, Mudbox/Zbrush and a pint of blood, maybe more…

First start shape exploring like a traditional artist would start a sketch design from imagination, from a fixed view, out of a very rough block, sometimes a primitive.

Then continue sculpting in Mudbox, or zbrush if you fancy.

If you don’t have an already made idea of what you want, let shapes that you define in the volume make the design for you, keeping aware of maintaining a composition that you consider appealing, trying not to skip bigger shapes to dive into detail.

Going in progression from bigger to smaller blocks, like silhouette and global volumes to smaller areas like single elements, accesories, microdetail, atoms… whatever your production demands are, is crucial to define a good gesture and volume expression all through the model.

Keeping a reasonable amount of thought in the materials that make up your shapes can save a lot of sculpting time, that way you can scupt drapery, for example, just by sculpting small folds in certain areas of interest in the model, while keeping an attractive flow to the form.

Depending on the kind of shapes you are aiming for, you can try to skip some certain levels of detail.

For example organic modeling doesn’t necessarily need middle-frequency detail, as muscles are big low-frequency shape, and pores and so on are small high-frequency detail, or if alternatively you are working on mechanical shapes, you can avoid the small, high-frequency detail altogether and focus on the big and middle blocks that will define the shapes.

Another key value towards fast composition is to keep a mental library of shapes that really work for you in a simple combination, you can scatter these around to create new design solutions, and problems to solve too.

Try to keep it loose and worry mainly about design and form, not about definition.

There is a plethora of tips and advices to actually define interesting sculpting workflows, including using stamps, alphas or multiple objects.

Most of the fundamentals can be shared more than ever from the traditional crafts thanks to the evolution of the new tools, so try to keep your knowledge broad.

Once you are pleased with a rough sculpture, you can always carry it back in a reasonable level to your classic 3D application and re-surface it for hard edges and edgeloops. this is very useful for production purposes, and it really makes the modeling process much faster and smoother.

* How do you see the future possibility of doing concept art in 3D?

Technically, designing in 3D as opposite to traditional 2D Concept Art, as of now, seems to have three main disadvantages.

The first and more crucial one being speed, which is an obvious as we are working in a full-fledged 3D model, this one is just relative to the artist skill, right now we are seeing more artists reducing the weeks or months from the old edgeloop modeling methods into some hours, and I’m confident this will just improve as time and tools advance.
Still, it will be tough to compete with the amazing haste of some traditional artists working on digital mediums, as they are obviously improving too!

On second place comes the inability to recreate additional volume to explore the possibility of different shapes, think of it as pure sculpting, where you can just “remove” space from a predefined block, therefore creating negative space, as opposite to modeling, in which you would work adding positive space. This is a missing piece in sculpting software as of now.

At last but not least, the hardware limitations, that can slow down your work flow as you dive deeply into your model’s microcosmos. Time only will help here, if he wants.

Artistically wise, I don’t see any other obstacle aside from the public and the industry acceptation of 3D as a medium of artistic exploration as valuable as any other.

*CG has come a long way, gone are the days of edge tweaking, programs like mudbox and zb has given the artists a lot more speed and flexibility. Where do you think CG is heading and how do you think it will affect the industry and artists?

I think CG as a medium is very young and many possibilities remain yet unexplored, eventually it will lean towards being an independent form of expression, or just another technical discipline depending only on what we make out of it.

The Industry on the other hand is of course in need of people that can use CG as a tool to produce whatever is demanding of them. If this is by itself an artist’s work, or more of an artisan, is open to very broad (and fierce!) discussion. In the end, I think the increasing market needs for a more “realistic” visual appeal, both in video games and film, will be only satisfied by those that really understand the more fundamental and traditional aspects of the craft.

Which in return makes the industry even more competitive, openning the doors for classically trained artists to work in modeling/sculping and the lesser technical disciplines of CG. Chances are they’ll steal our jobs and strong sense of dignity.

*From your experience in videogames, what do you think of the Next Gen demands as related to graphic quality?

Next-Gen appears to be trapped under the inmense pressure of consumer expectations. Seems to be like tomorrow, a concept for something that will never really arrive.

Obviously the main factor to define how close a game is to that mystical definition these days is “Realism”, as in predictable interactions between the elements, but aside from being the most obvious resource to borrow ideas from, realism does not make a game experience instantly interesting to play, or to look at, for that matter, not all the photos of reality we make are appealing to the eye, are they?

Also as a part-time fortune teller I can blurringly foresee a public tired of games that, by sticking too close to a “lack” of defined style resemble too much to each other, devaluating their best efforts.

While Certain conditions will have to be satisfied for something to be appealing. Video games as entertainment, need only core mechanisms to be fun, Pong speaks.

Different layers of complexity can be added on top to make the game feel and look different, but they should never limit or condition the basic mechanics of a game, and obviously they should never aim to replace them.

Stylization seems to be the only reasonable next step, just idealizing the more iconic or abstract aspect of any element, until is still interesting to see, and let this slowly replace the visual realism, specially to minimize the prodution costs that is increasing the risk of game crafting for studios, that in return, try to minimize the risk by creating redundant content that they can predict will profit, all in a bloody innovation sacrifice.

so huge normal maps and bloom only are not going to cut it, sorry.

What are your sources of inspiration?
Everything, really, remnants of my past and distant lands and peoples, as in the classic sense, Literature (try Samuel Beckett!), Films (Fellini, Godard), Videogames (Zelda, Final Fantasy, anything japanese will do).

Fellow artists, among some that blew me away today, and among some that did it in the past I could randomly name: Jose Ismael Fernandez, Sabin Howard, John Pence, Richard McDonald, Leighton, Alma-Tadema, Bouguereau, Andrea del Sarto, Phil Hale, Ashley Wood, Otomo, Shirow, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Katsuya Terada, Range Murata, Dali, Velazquez, Sargent, Andrew Loomis… the list gets lost in the horizon…

*What is your idealogy when it comes to creating art?
Do it your own and let it speak for you, listen to it too from time to time and see what it has to say, don’t be rude

*Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions. Any last words?
It’s been a pleasure, thanks for the interest and the time to read my mumblings!
For more of Victor’s work, check out his website at www.santaquiteria.net

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