Art Envelope - Jason Connell

Mush!

2012-02-02T00:43:00.000-08:00

Mush!

Is how my brain is feeling lately.

I was messing around in maya modeling trees and rendering a light direction. I liked that process a lot..

Background is painted and foreground all painted over.

A version without Mushy.

Quick sketches before starting

fishy

2011-11-16T20:02:00.001-08:00

Quick sketch before jumping back on a bigger project.

Squids with Mustaches

2011-11-07T19:12:00.001-08:00

Squids with Mustaches: weekend thumbnails

A collection of rough sketches from the weekend. I'm planning on taking the 1st and 2nd image to full matte painting. The bottom 4 were all created in the thought that they may be the same world.

Besides... squids and mustaches...

Ice Matte

2011-10-27T22:09:00.000-07:00

Ice Matte

Lots of work here. I wanted to do a large range of ice/snow mountains. I played with adding several elements in. There are about 40 photos used with layer masks. Still a lot to do in order to clean it up, but I may move on as I learned a ton from this.
This is a 4k, but only posting the 2k for now.

Beams. As usual.

Scratch photo ref sheet
Just a few of the images used.

Moving on - Spire Final Matte

2011-10-16T15:58:00.000-07:00

Spire

I'm calling it done for this one. Learned a ton regarding Matte paintings and I plan to do more. Thanks to everyone who helped provide critique and high-fives when needed.

Quick Concept for Matte 2

2011-10-10T22:53:00.000-07:00

Concept layout for Matte painting #2.

I really wanted to do ice...so I'm going to try :)

I'll be finishing the first matte painting this week.

Spire - Sky Plate

2011-09-30T18:47:00.000-07:00

Sky plate for the background of my Matte Painting. Again, first time I used this technique and I'm super happy with the outcome so far. I took all the photos used in this matte painting plate except the 2 in the middle (there are about 4 others used to a lesser extent as well). The rest is all painted using masks and or brushes.

Will do final color tweaks when its placed in final matte painting. Posting a smaller image here until my final is done and i'll post the full 4000 wide image.

Spire - End of Week 2

2011-09-27T19:16:00.000-07:00

Spire - End of Week 2
So, after pretty heavy iteration and a pretty big photosafari this weekend, I was able to catch up and submit my condept art for the end of week 2. Week 3 we head into starting the ACTUAL matte painting. This image is around 1000 wide....while the new one will be something like 4000.

Spire - Week 1 - Night 2

2011-09-13T23:31:00.000-07:00

Spire - Details... first time
So tonight I spent hours looking up photo reference for textures. I found some AWESOME images of the zhangjiaji national forest that had some awesome rocks with foliage on them. Left side is still a mess...but I'm tired.... Implemented a ton of feedback from instructor (who is a badass by the way). Check out his matte painting work at: http://davidluong.net/subpages/mattepainting.html

Below is one section taken a little bit further as I try to figure out what these are gonna be :)

So, for the few of you that actually follow my blog... You'll know that I never internally detail anything. This was, surprisingly, a huge challenge.

Spire

2011-09-12T22:24:00.000-07:00

Spire - Matte Painting class

First concept for my matte painting class. 2 hours.

Hex

2011-09-11T16:26:00.000-07:00

Hex - 1 hour

Some sketch practice before the matte painting class work. Used a lot of subtractive (erase) brush strokes. Started with a red dot and thats it.

SPP!

2011-09-02T23:37:00.001-07:00

I had a productive day at work today working on our DLC... so I treated myself to a fricken Pepsi, which was totally yuckers... all 5 sips.

I started this as I was about to leave work and got a little carried away. You know.... I dont really know what these are that are coming out of my head, but I like making them. I start a Matte Painting course in 1 more week... so I'm pretty excited to learn some new techniques.

I also have a ton of pictures from my redwoods camping trip to post as well. But, essentially... they can be summed up by this: WE ARE INSIDE A TREE...

Just a Smidge

2011-09-02T00:55:00.000-07:00

Just a Smidge...

So says the last check-in of the night in perforce. Thanks to Mike Haney for the comments during the Bauhaus Art'n Night. Tried a different approach to creating shapes. Some worked. Some didnt. <3 <3

Night.

bauuuuuhaus blues

2011-08-22T03:33:00.000-07:00

Hurry Up, We're Dreaming.

ballooooons: Congrats to my homies at Epic Games for going GOLD on their game. Looking forward to playing it :) Here are a few balloons for you.

Some practice with a real photo and comping it. Trying some new splatter brushes too. Lots just sketchin shapes and deleting, and trying again.

Rainbow Jibba Jabah

2011-08-20T00:43:00.001-07:00

Two cats: running around while I was at Joe Pikop and Sabrina Boler's place. Got some arts done though. More practice with different brushes and techniques. I snuck a sky in too...

Night !

Sky Sky Sky. inFamous 2.

2011-08-16T22:54:00.001-07:00

inFamous 2 Skies

I spent a good bit of time working on the skies for inFAMOUS 2. These are two of my favorite and are a mix of about 70% painted and some photo reference that I took.

The rest... over at...
http://art.jason-connell.com

Sky

2011-08-16T22:31:00.000-07:00

Sky: Just some practice using a small portion of a texture for color. I tried some new very small brush techniques for bright spots. Roughly 20 min.

Sketches

2011-08-16T21:57:00.000-07:00

Sketch Sicky: Tonight I spent some time just playing around with value. No color... as some of you know I can be a little obsessed with. I am totally sick and it totally sucks.

Sketch A: Not really sure the goal here...more repeating shapes. I was going to try and create a shape that revolved around the center of this. This was about 30 minutes.

Sketch B: about 40 minutes... I kept wanting to add color but didnt! Go me.

Weekend arts...Shapes and Sparth

2011-08-15T00:40:00.001-07:00

Weekend doodles:

First one from my brain. Comp, Color and brush practice.

Second one is a study off of Sparth. I find his work to be very inspring right now.

Cheesy Asparagus

2011-08-09T03:48:00.000-07:00

Some work from this evening. Shapes. Color. Brushes. Practice.

sky fire

2011-08-07T23:39:00.000-07:00

Sky Fire
Some work and experiments of the past week. The bottom right has a lot of shapes from one of Sparth's paintings. That man is a magician :) I may actually finish these one day, but for now they are just great excercises. The sky a finished asset that is actually a great back drop for these studies. I may try a green sky next week.

Lost

2011-08-04T15:03:00.000-07:00

Now that inFAMOUS 2 is done, I've had some time to draw and paint. I woke up sick this morning so I stayed home. Not much else to do, so I have been on my couch doodling and listening to jets (blue angels outside) go by all day.

inFAMOUS 2 finished. Portfolio updated.

2011-08-03T15:08:00.000-07:00

art.jason-connell.com has been updated with all of my new work from inFAMOUS 2. I ended up doing a lot of the sky textures and also a good bit of marketing key art (posters, banners, magazines). Check it out!

Screenshots of inFAMOUS 2

2011-03-18T23:05:00.000-07:00

Screenshot party!

Aside from lighting and sky work for the game, lately I have been trying to help out the screenshot guy for inFAMOUS 2. It's mostly just a lot of trial and error and trying to grab that perfect shot of action, color, contrast.... and showing general chaos.

More shots were released over at IGN earlier this month. http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/038/038010/imgs_1.html

2010-11-13T10:34:00.000-08:00

inFAMOUS 2 on the Holiday cover

This got me really excited today. Link to PS blog below.

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2010/11/12/infamous-2-on-cover-of-playstation-the-official-magazine/

Sucker Punched! inFAMOUS 2

2010-10-23T14:11:00.000-07:00

I've happily relocated to Seattle, WA to work at an awesome studio called Sucker Punch Productions. I'm doing lighting and sky work for the game inFAMOUS 2. So, I may be a little slow on the personal art contributions for a while.

If you're in the Seattle area and would like to grab a coffee and talk about art. Just send me an email.

Cheers!
Jason

Creature Box: Sketch practice

2010-07-30T19:52:00.000-07:00

Continuing with my study of the creature box style artwork. www.creaturebox.com

Color Study: Creature Box 2

2010-07-28T20:23:00.000-07:00

Creature Box!

I'm a huge fan of Creature Box. Dave Guertin and Greg Baldwin are pretty amazing artists. Less successful sketch, but still had fun with it. Tried a new "firmness" on my cintiq...and I'm not sure if I liked it. Going to continue these for a while I hope.

Color Study: Creature Box

2010-07-27T21:43:00.002-07:00

Creature Box!

I'm a huge fan of Creature Box. Dave Guertin and Greg Baldwin are pretty amazing artists. Just having some fun after looking at one of their books.

Mauro, again.

2010-07-27T21:35:00.001-07:00

Mauro Train

Blocking mostly done. I've done a few pieces in high poly. Lighting is close to being done. Sky is placeholder. Waiting for my new machine until I finish this one. Too many hipoly pieces that need normals baked.

Inspired by www.artofben.com

Unearthly Challenge: Finished

2009-12-06T17:49:00.001-08:00

Unearthly Challenge: Finished

Here is one of the final shots that we submitted for Unearthly Challenge 2009. Final lighting and a subtle lens flare really helped tie it together. With more time I would have done a little more work on the sky. Results have not been announced yet.

Unearthly Challenge: Lighting and lots more.

2009-11-09T21:04:00.001-08:00

Added an orange variant of In Youngs petal plant and PFX. Changed sunlight direction drastically. Was losing a lot of normals and edges in the glaciers.

Added a first pass sky and a soft lens flare. No sun yet though. :) Added a rough in of the Freezer Ships creeping over the top of the ridge.

Robby is working on actually making those pretty. I just roughed it in. Continued with point lights and narrowed down our composition and shot layout to this one and another 1. 6 more days left.

Currently over budget on polys and under budget on textures. About mid this week I'll be taking the back mountains and turning them into a poly plane / card. Should cut out about 100k polys and we'll be in perfect budget territory.

More color and scene composition aid coming tomorrow for the foreground. 7:00 am til Midnight. Time for sleep.

Unearthly Challenge: Lighting

2009-11-07T22:40:00.001-08:00

Working hard on environment challenge. Mainly focusing on lighting at this point. Some placeholders still in the space.

Most of the map is using Lightmass from Unreal Development Kit. The foliage-ish looking stuff is all hand lit. I was not having luck getting them to behave properly with emissive and alpha masks. Actually happier with the hand placed lights for these guys. Otherwise though, the Lightmass system is pretty awesome.

Pillar

2009-09-27T19:17:00.000-07:00

Art Contest, August: Create a Pillar.

No restrictions, other than a 2048 texture sheet. Mostly procedural textures with a few pieces done with normal/diffuse/specular. Two weeks in the evenings after work. Rendered in Unreal.

Fun

2009-05-20T20:20:00.000-07:00

Spark
I'm feeling good. Found some good inspiration today on the internet, so I started doing some painting with some photos I had laying around.

Night!javascript:void(0)

Z Brush Practice Day 4

2009-05-17T19:33:00.000-07:00

Zbrush Practicing
I did this about 2 months ago.

This is a piece of wrist armor I was just playing with. I wanted to learn how to use the subtools in a different manner. I plotted some color out for it and stopped, no intention on finishing this. It was just a practice in tools and I was happy with the outcome. On to bigger things.

Robot Love

2009-05-17T19:30:00.001-07:00

An image from the background art of Robot Love. This was done during Global Game Jam 2009. My friend, Demond, and I did the art.

Penny Dreadful

2009-02-10T13:04:00.000-08:00

Met some of these guys at the Carolina Games Summit this past weekend. They were all super nice and were pretty passionate about their work. I'll post some pictures soon enough, but wanted to give a shoutout to them.

http://www.getdreadful.com/

Global Game Jam 2009

2009-02-04T13:32:00.000-08:00

Global Game Jam is a great way for students to get involved in some serious game development and get an idea of what it is like to work with some professionals under a very short allocated time frame. We had 48 hours to develop a game. This is what we came up with. We accomplished a lot during this short amount of time and here were the results. I considered it a great art study into 2D.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI1erPKs3aM&fmt=22

I'll post screenshots later.

www.globalgamejam.com
www.globalgamejam.com/games/robot-love

Last day at America's Army

2008-11-21T21:14:00.000-08:00

My Last Day at America's Army.

Here are some Official Screenshots. Released in November 2008.

Train Station Final : Pictures.

2008-08-15T10:28:00.000-07:00

I'm finally getting around to posting my final images from the Train Station. I do, however, have a few more things that I want to do, but I have gotten to a happy place with this particular piece.

Train Station WIP #4 Architecture, Railings, Lots more.

2008-06-10T20:24:00.000-07:00

Train Station WIP #4 - Architecture, Railings, Lots more.
http://www.artofben.com/ (Ben Mauro)

This is the part where I ask myself. "Would you kindly finish this already!"
Thanks self. I'm not sure if its the coffee, or the La Pinata in my belly, but I have a lot of energy. I went through a few versions of these steps but just ended up going witht his version because frankly, I was tired of messing with it. They came out pretty good though.

Railings: These were a lot of fun. I made a few versions in the engine real quick. I then painted a few other versions in PS. I ended up going with the bottom version. I felt the top was a bit too much.

Shot 3: Finally got some color that I like. This kind of pushed me into the right direction. Some technical stuff here I noticed are things like the Alphas are not casting shadows. I'll fix that in the next update. At this point, I wasnt sure if the railing was going to stay down here or only be used at the top area as I planned originally.

Train Station WIP #3 - Decor! Color! Iteration!

2008-04-18T09:55:00.001-07:00

Train Station WIP #3 - Decor! Color! Iteration!

http://www.artofben.com/ (Ben Mauro)

So. To put it simply. I did a lot of research for art nouveau. I found some pretty funky stuff! I ended up making my own with some copper/gold trim in mind. 1st on left is a picture of the pillar design with a normal map in UE3. I see potential in it but the sides are really plane. I need to do something. I was thinking a fan or something similar.

Color: I then started slapping some globs of color on there. I decided on a pallete for the scene based off this piece and the train. I'll post the pallete that I used in a later post. I went through about 4 iterations of colors for the pillar, but decided I really liked the red/maroon center with a gold spec on it. There is an ugly line in this picture. But the idea was "paint it fast, get it in, see if I like it". So, it served its purpose. I painted the texture and uploaded this material in about 20 minutes. You can imagine how much time this can save if you do this for every major piece. It saves a lot of time.

Basically, what I'm saying is, Do not get caught up in details early on. Too many artists get caught up in making it perfect the first time. It's all about iteration here. So, its perfectly ok for your first piece to look a little jank. It's all about finding the right colors, shapes, and feeling before taking it that extra step and finalizing it.

Shot 3 more colors: You can see I adjusted the colors here to a more gray with a hint of yellow in it. Most of the over powering yellow/gold is from the specular map that I have here. This is going to be a very dramatic lighting scenario, so I know what I can get away with, and what I can't. In picture 3, one thing to notice is the detail levels. I focused on large, medium and small. I still think I'm lacking a little bit of the small detail, but hopefully that will come later with additional environment assets.

Shot 4: Another shot with a temp fan in there as a material that I've used elsewhere in the past. BioShock actually uses a lot of geometry. The final one will be geometry spinning on a center axis. It will be an asset that can be used in a lot of situations to provide that extra flare to the scene. BioShock did a great job making a lot of moving parts. It made it all feel very real. I'm am taking that aspect into my scene here.

Train Station WIP #2 - The Train

2008-04-09T23:57:00.000-07:00

Train Station WIP #2 - The Train!
Influence: http://www.artofben.com/ (Ben Mauro)

So, I started thinking about the scene and how foggy/steamy it would be. I decided that it needed to have some hot emissive materials for anything emitting light. So I setup the headlights and the interior lights to a 3Vector Constant material seperate from the Train texture sheet in Unreal. This lets me very quickly control the emissive light that is coming from the trains lights. It really REALLY helps when you start completing the scene and need to quickly adjust the lights. Much better than reimporting a texture that's for sure!

The train is covered in bolts / rivets. I loved that about Ben's concept. One because it just looks super industrial, and two for another more technical reason. In the engine, all those little bolts are going to add a very small hint of light/specularity and will really add that small scale of detail to the train.

I obviously took some liberties with the design. My favorite is his above connected train/passenger carrier, but I felt this one would fit the scene better.

I originally made this a 2048 but ended up scaling down to 1024 for the engine. There are some Alpha wires on the underside that help sell it if you are looking straight at it.

Fun model. Next blog will be the start of the world environement import into Unreal 3.

Train Station WIP #1 Intro

2008-04-08T23:18:00.000-07:00

Bioshock Art Study.

Inspired by http://www.artofben.com/ and 2K Boston/Australia's BioShock.

So, I started a scene based off my love for a few things.

1)A need to expand my art abilities and styles.
2)I enjoyed playing Bioshock.
3)I feel its a good test to my skillset in Unreal Editor.
4)Because its fun. And you all know how I feel about fun.
5) www.artofben.com nuff said!

Timeline: 1 month. Lets see what can get done between my job and this!

So here is the first screenshots. Top: I loved the emissive signs in Bioshock. I really wanted to emulate the style of signs here with my Locomotive sign. I really liked Arcadia and the ROLLING HILLS sign. Lovely. Still have more work to do on it though. Second: I really like this method. Blocking everything out in Maya or a 3d package. It really lets you have a better understanding what your scene will look like in the end. (and also make a ton of changes quickly).

Bioshock "We all make choices in life, but in the end our choices make us."

2008-04-08T20:34:00.000-07:00

I found this quote very fitting for me! I really enjoyed this game for a number of reasons. I guess what really stands out first and foremost is the art style. I really enjoyed the Art Deco/Nouveau styled environments, which was very fitting for the game and period of time they had the game take place.

Ah, Rapture! I love it. I mean yea, sure, it has crazy weapon upgrades and plasmids that make you shoot fire, but you know what? When playing through the game, it all seems believable. I really like the advertisements in the game. Everything from the wall art to the little animated plasmid videos you get to watch.

I actually enjoy the story. I've personally always been intrigued by stories that go against the norm. Andrew Ryan and Rapture had a very interesting idea in mind. You can tell that Andrew Ryan really believed in his city.

Which leads me to Character development. I love the audio journals. They really make the story for me. I couldn't wait what to hear what the next person had to say. The only annoying thing here was that if you were in action, you couldn't really hear what they were saying. But, you could always just go back and replay it.

I'll be posting my WIP from a scene I've been working on for about 2 weeks now. Please check out www.artofben.com . As my scene is very inspired by his concept art (and obviously, Bioshock)

-Jason

TF2 Study "I never really was on your side!"

2008-04-04T00:52:00.001-07:00

Ahh. Team Fortress 2. Definition of FUN. What a great game. The things I like about this game are:

1) Colors: They really drove home the blue vs red. They did such a great job with the textures and feel of each side. The cool vs warm colors. The steel mill look vs the farm look. I love it. Too many games are super desaturated these days. They look good in their own right, but I'm just happy to see some colors!

2) Simple = Fun: Valve did a great job balancing out the classes. Game play for TF2 is very simple. It is a clear case of less is more and it really works for the game. Their decision to take out grenades for TF2 was a great decision simply because it added another element to the game.

3)Character Development: Oh man. I get excited watching the "Meet the Team" videos. Each character has so much personality! My personal favorite characters are the Engineer and the Pyro.

What I'd like to see (besides the new content in April) is an adjustment to how the Engineers points are accumulated. I think they are not getting enough points to provide incentive to play them.

My personal study into the game has yielded a lot of hand painted textures. Lower resolution maps with higher polycount objects. My favorite part of my TF2 map making and asset creation is the ability to give an inanimate object a personality or characteristic feel.

I just want to take this time out and reiterate on how important FUN is to the player. It is important to gamers. Too much complex stuff going on in a game can really pull away from the FUN aspect. I think Valve did a great job explaining this at GDC 2008 during the portal talk. If it wasnt absolutely necessary and fun, they axed it. Guess what!? Portal was fun too.

America's Army PC 3.0

2007-04-15T10:22:00.000-07:00

This month I began working on America's Army 3.0 for PC. This is a tactical military styled shooter game for the PC. I have begun working as a general 3d environment artist. We are using the Unreal 3.0 engine for production of the game. The game is scheduled for release in Sept of 08.