The Importance of Concept art

Concept art and its importance to the Games industry.

What is concept art?: Concept art is and drawing or visual creation created to plan a product. Concept art is not just used in games design. Concept art can be used in a range of product development from planning a new phone to a new building. However it's in film ,animation and games design concept art has its widest range of applications.

Concept art is used to show ideas and plans before creating polished versions of them. Generally concept art is heavily important in the development process.
Bellow is a selection of concept art used in game including bio shock. The concept art dark and has a almost late Victorian style to it. Its also quite gory meaning it would probably be used in horror games.

Concept art helps an idea take the next step in becoming reality. Writers and game planners will give artists a brief about the game ideas for location and things the game will and could contain.

Game artists will then be let loose to draw and create anything from environments to characters even the look of the UI on screen. They will generate hundreds of ideas that will be looked at be the lead developers.There are many concept art generalists, but there are also many specialised concept artists. The various specialisations are: Character Design, Creature Design, Environment Design, and Industrial Design. Many concept artists have more than one specialisation or are specialised in one thing and know the basics of the others. Specialisation is regarded as better for freelancers than concept artists who want to work In-House since they are usually required to know how to do everything. For freelance concept artists specialisation can lead you to being hired based on your specialisation. Knowing the foundations of art such as anatomy, perspective, colour theory, design, and lighting should never be disregarded since they are the bread and butter of a concept artist.

This allows creators to pick all their favourite part of drawings from the eyes of a player two the colour of a planet. Artists can put these ideas together  and create new and better drawings and when eventually agreed upon can be turned into reality inside the game.

The creation of good concept art is a very natural process of trial and error. Creators will do hundreds  of rough sketches which some small and some massive variations.

Smaller game team and studios will have less artists or even have artists which have other jobs in the games creation. Big studios like EA will have hundreds of concept artists producing for them with team leaders helping them collaborate between themselves.

As i'm working by myself the amount of concept art will be a lot lower. This means the ideas going into the game will be expanded on a lot less and I will end up sticking quite close to my original idea. I will choose between my drawings and eventually scan my favourite into Maya. I can the use this model to plan and create a 3D model which will be exported into Unreal.
stages for concept art

1. Quick concept art and sketches:

This stage is where the most of the creations will be made . Artists will sketch lots low detail sketches to choose between.

2. Adding Mass mood and a colour palate: The sketchers will the exclude and poor and unsalable sketches and move to adding basic colour and mood to the sketch to get a better ideas of how these would feel in games.

3. Refining and shading:

This stage artists will choose a handful of sketches they like. They then take them one step further,  by adding shading and refining the parts of the sketch that they don't like.

4. Choosing One: The artist will then choose one sketch to put forward they may even redraw the sketch before hand. If the image is approved  it's sent to a modelling team to begin creation

https://www.unseen64.net/2014/12/01/mankind-the-last-of-us-beta-ps3/

This drawing is of concept art created for a game. It contains borderlands character which have multiple different interchangeable parts. This Gives developers choices on how they want their final character to look. It also contains a colour pallet and a description of their characters design. The Concept art of this character gives them a basic front facing version and also multiple angles to help modding teams get an idea of the characters 3D shape.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/a3/52/72/a3527245b7c2eb1adbf6423400e79968.jpg
The concept art show above is character concept art it lakes backgrounds or a environment instead it is being used to choose the looks and design of a character in a game this concept art is more specif and often will have lots of very similar looking ideas. The moods staying very similar and slight variations on the colour pallet.

This is a piece of concept art in its final stages. It Contains multiple characters and a environment. The setting the concept art portrays is very futuristic and dark. The artist has used mainly greys and browns for his colour palette. These are important point for other creators of the titles as they will help keep the game to a similar theme. This concept art could also be used for backgrounds and posters This concept art is not so much used for 3D character modelling as it is to show off a setting a design to a game. This art would be used to show developers what they are aiming for a final product to look like.

Overall Concept art is one of many important steps in games design. With out concept art new game ideas may never be given the time to be explored. Concept art is not only away to create the first steps towards in game assets but away to express modes feeling and ideas for games.

http://www.creativebloq.com/creativity/4-steps-creating-concept-art-extra-depth-101413175

http://atomhawk.com/concept-art