What photographic or other sources do you use to inspire the space artwork in Star Citizen? For example how do you determine the colours and shading used in star types and the various planets?asked by AragornBH
TL;DRDaniel Kamensky builds reference from real-world objects collected on Pinterest, not other computer graphics, and Lance Powell adds that concept art is dialed toward plausible real-world looks for stars and planets by production artists.
Daniel Kamensky: Planets are a little bit...I can talk about what I use when I'm doing surfacing on ships and normally what I go to is I have, one of the popular resources for a lot of artists, especially at our company, is Pinterest. We have running galleries of a lot of stuff, and I'll look at a lot of planes, a lot of tanks, a lot of cars, I just slowly, whenever I see a surface I like, I grab it, I put it in a folder, and I save it for later. So I have a library in my head of, if I was going to build an Aegis ship, I'd be like, so Aegis is kind of militaristic, scary, industrial, panzer. That black, slightly glossy paint, you know, that kind of thing. So it's not so much a matter of texture reference for photo source, it's building up a reference, and one of the things I keep catching artists doing is they will constantly look at other computer graphics to draw inspiration from, and the key to creating believable materials is drawing all your reference from real world things.
Exactly. I think, to add to the question, and round out the PU, you also touched on it. We're building a Universe that's meant to be accurate. So, if there's a red giant, or there's a brown dwarf, or there's a white dwarf, we're shooting for something that's meant to be plausible. I think that from the concept creation side, the concept artists go out there and create the look they want based off of a feeling they're trying to capture, but then the production artists get their hands on it, and we dial it in towards the real world.