Art Direction

In this exercise, our group needs to interview a real creative company and obtain information from the interview about the workflow of the commercial creative industry and analyze them.

My job in the group collaboration is to find and contact companies and interview them. My ultimate goal is to work for a studio in China called "Huaxing Huichuang Co., Ltd.". The company is responsible for art outsourcing projects for some game projects.

By contacting the company, I obtained the consent of the company's head, Mr. Xing, to conduct an interview. Before the interview, we needed to submit the questions we wanted to ask to the company for review in advance. Due to some privacy and legal reasons, some questions could not be answered.

In the final list of questions, we decided on the following as the content of the interview:

1. The composition of the game concept art team

2. The team's management

3. The basic process and milestones of the project

4. Mr. Xing's personal introduction and company introduction

5. Career advice for current creative majors

And the sub-questions derived from the above questions (see the interview transcript link for details)

Based on the information obtained from the interviews, I summarized the basic content structure of productization and pipeline：

Production Structure & Pipeline

Our production model balances creativity with predictable delivery. The organizational structure groups specialists into six collaborating units: Creative (ideation, tone, references), Art (2D concept, 3D modeling, surfacing, animation, VFX, UI), Tech/TA (engine integration, tools, performance budgets), Production (planning, resourcing, risk), QA (functional and visual validation), and Client Services (briefs, reviews, approvals). Creative direction and TA form the backbone that keeps style and performance coherent from day one.

The pipeline runs in five stages. Concept produces moodboards, rough sketches, and a lean brief to align scope and audience. Pre-production locks visual language and delivery targets through style guides, keyframes, and storyboards (or model sheets/turnarounds). Production converts plans into shippable assets and features: models, textures, rigs, UI, VFX, plus an engine-playable prototype. Post focuses on integration and polish—lighting and VFX tuning, LODs, memory/CPU/GPU budgets, and regression QA. Delivery hands off a stable build for client acceptance, with source packs and documentation.

Primary tools include Adobe Photoshop (2D paint and overpaint), Autodesk Maya/3ds Max (modeling/animation), Substance Painter (texturing), and either Unreal Engine or Unity for in-engine assembly and performance checks.

Typical timeframes for a mid-scope engagement: Concept 1–2 weeks, Pre-production 2 weeks, Production 4–8 weeks, Post 1–2 weeks, then Delivery on the final day. Milestones track “Direction Lock → Style Lock → Playable Prototype → Optimization & QA → Gold.

Project (Enrichment)
As a way to test the results of our research, we need to apply the knowledge gained from these interviews to complete a project.
Based on the group discussion, we decided to create concept art for a pixel-based side-scrolling game, including UI, character design, and environment design.At the same time, our theme needed to align with the United Nations' goals, so we chose "Life on Land" as our theme.
After several discussions, we finalized the name of the game project:“ Enrichment.”This is a brutalist-style pixel art dungeon game featuring a fox as the protagonist. In our design concept, the player controls a small pixelated fox exploring an underground city built in a brutalist architectural style, trying to find a way out. The contrast between the abandoned concrete structures and nature is intended to prompt players to reflect on the destruction and impact of man-made structures on the environment.
In this project, I am responsible for the main technical art. I will complete the final game assets and in-game concept scenes based on the sketches and concepts provided for other idioms.
Strategically, I borrowed some techniques from similar pixel-art games, using 3D models and special post-processing to achieve the pixelated style (like Dead Cells). This technique allows me to quickly build rich environments without requiring extremely advanced pixel art skills. Creating purely hand-drawn pixel art assets is a highly demanding task in terms of both skill and time, meaning it's not a realistic approach for a team of our size.I almost immediately began researching 3D pixel post-processing techniques, using Blender as the core tool for this work. Blender has a compositor system that allows for real-time rendering, which is ideal for rapid project iteration.After several iterations, I arrived at the final version of the pixel synthesizer, a completely customized synthesis solution for this project. It includes pixelated masks precise down to individual objects, a complete set of color correction presets, and post-processing effects such as fog and Tyndall scattering.

The character design also involves very important technical details. I anticipate we will likely need animation frames and demonstrations of different actions, so a fully rigged fox character is also necessary.

Since all 3D meshes need to be processed by a synthesizer to be transformed into a pixelated style, the models don't require a lot of detail or mesh faces. However, they do need clear color contrasts and shape transitions to improve readability after the pixelation process. Therefore, I chose a low-poly style for the modeling.

Regarding the environment, I needed to design it entirely from concept to the complete scene. However, this also gave me an advantage; I didn't need to draw sketches, I could start building and iterating the environment directly in Blender. I used a procedural approach; the entire city was built using geometry nodes. I only needed to model the basic building modules, and then the geometry nodes would complete the construction of the entire massive scene.

Color grading is a crucial step, as it essentially determines the quality of a game's visuals. Many people describe a game's graphics as "high-quality" or criticize them as "tacky," and these opinions are often based on different color grading choices. I decided to use a color grading scheme with light orange highlights, cyan/green midtones, and cool cyan/purple shadows, utilizing the ACES color space. This approach maintains high dynamic range visibility while providing a stylized visual effect, conveying the contrast between abandoned concrete structures and lush greenery.

I created several different color presets to use in different situations.

When actually building in-game-like scenes, I needed to find a way to separate the foreground, middle ground, and background, otherwise players wouldn't be able to distinguish which objects were on the same plane and which were in the distant background. So I used a very clever method: I created two huge, semi-transparent planes, placed between objects at different depths, to create an effect similar to layered fog, while consuming very little performance.

My team members designed the enemies, but I didn't have enough time to model and rig them like the fox character. I tried making them into billboards and pixelating them using a pixel synthesizer. Although it required some adjustments to the synthesizer, the final result was acceptable.

搜索此博客

TAO YUZE (0366967) Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media

Art Direction

Group Link Collection：

Exercise1

评论

发表评论

热门博文

Vehicle and Props Design