Entertainment Design workflows

[doppelganger]

regards all,

I am curious if some of those pros who have worked as concept artists in art departments can tell me a little about the workflow. How do designs usually start? I have heard of shape studies, and I know about isometrics, I have also heard of "call outs" but I am not sure what they are.

Is there a standard flow to the design process that an art director wants to see in a portfolio, i.e. isometrics, then perspective projections, mood paintings, then details?

Please share anything you think may apply.

Scott

[Jin]

Hi,

"Callouts" are text describing parts of an image, with what's called "leader lines" pointing to the part of the image being described. You'll see this in technical manuals and text books, for instance. Here's an article on callouts and leader lines and how the leader lines can be made to show when passing over both white around the image and black within the image:

http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/10856.html?origin=story

(In comics and other kinds of art such as the kind you're learning to do, I don't know if the text is referred to as "callouts".)

Isometric drawings are generally done using either 30 degree or 60 degree angles to describe the horizontal lines (in my experience, more often 30 degrees). Here's a simple example:

http://mathforum.org/workshops/sum98/participants/sanders/Isom.html

In isometric drawing, all horizontal lines are parallel, as opposed to those found in perspective drawings which lead to a vanishing point. In other words, objects don't get smaller as they move into the distance, so isometric drawings are not realistic.

They're used a lot by engineers so that additional parts can be added to the drawing without problems you'd experience if the drawing was done in perspective. Here's a simple example of two point perspective drawing, though there are several ways to draw in perspective, with one vanishing point, two vanishing points, three vanishing points, or multiple vanishing points:

http://mathforum.org/workshops/sum98/participants/sanders/Persp.html


Technical illustration often uses isometric drawing for the reasons described in the paragraph above, so more parts can easily be added to the drawing and still fit together.

As to workflow, I would think that depends on the specific kind of work being done and also the specific company, department, and its procedures. It can vary, even doing basically the same kind of work. For instance, I worked for many years as a technical illustrator in various companies in and around Silicon Valley, CA. Each company had its own ways of working, organizing the workflow, etc.

My guess this goes for any kind of artwork, since companies are so different in how they choose to set their departments up to interact with each other, and how each department is run (which can change drastically if a new department manager is hired and decides to put his/her stamp on the organization!).