Finding Your Art Direction | RDC 2024 transcript

please welcome from sorse interactive Gino Roy to the stage how you doing so excited all my favorite people are here oh my gosh thank you so much jeez Louise got a lot of fun stuff to show you guys we' been working on and welcome to finding your art Direction with me Gino Roy I go by heart hurts on Roblox and I have spent four years on the platform fairly new uh I have a film and animation background and uh yeah I've cut music videos for Mac Miller Beyonce uh Nicki Minaj and um I've cut a couple feature films um I've directed liveaction commercials and TV series um I spent 5 years doing music VFX and animation at Disney so yeah a lot of uh film and animation behind this um I'm an avid Pig Enthusiast I as you can see from my my avatar so if I snort that's just me being in character okay and um I'm based out of Los Angeles and I work at saw horse yeah fun fact I actually Drew this I spent a copia hours trying to you know find anything quirky that felt Whimsical and part of like what saw horse really is and yeah I've done a lot of that work at sorse especially the film background um doing the music videos and uh becoming an an art director and um you know a director in live action so look at this all this in four years this is crazy to me like honestly being new to the platform and like 5 years ago I just thought I was going to be at Leica or like still a saw horse doing like animation like a animation Wing but no we're here I'm I love it here it is amazing I we're so honored to be uh you know nominated backtack years for um you know best studio that's crazy that's crazy to me so um yeah I started at saor 10 years ago when we were just doing film you know we a traditional film studio and doing a bunch of that work so that's kind of like where my where my head's at so but four years ago we started making Roblox games with mostly filmmakers like we had a bunch of filmmakers scratching our heads trying to figure out how we could do this but we we brought on some really passionate devs and Roblox experts and filmmakers like me adapting to the platform and yeah we're we're we're having a great time so um our other main art director who's uh ALS also a filmmaker is Jessica Weiss Thomas she works out of Alaska we're a completely remote uh interactive team so she works in Alaska she just had a baby she's like crazy talented I'm constantly inspired by her um but yeah we we you know we do a lot of branded content branded experiences this is something that saw hor has done for even before uh interactive we did a lot of branded content so we're very familiar with telling brand stories and it's really passionate uh really passionate about telling those stories in the right way so I didn't think I was going to be here but I feel like I've trained my entire life for this you know from building blocks to Legos coloring books ET a sketch and now as a profession after all of this training I'm still drawing sketches and playing with blocks that was my dad by the way he's a fine artist he's uh incredibly talented and today I'm here to teach you a little bit about my process and some of the um tools that I use every day to accomplish them and first we'll talk about concept art next building a world then lighting and lastly color and why these four exactly well you know they're very powerful when you use them correctly but when they're often skipped and left a chance so I learned concept art and storyboarding working at Disney so I'm want to impart a couple of things I've learned along the way um exploring visual concepts learning how to take time to save time and digging into the details and this is a concept art I did in Photoshop it's a digital painting um for Walmart discovered and really enjoyed doing it we were we're exploring like a box uh cubic theme so that's where you'll find a lot of cubic uh imagery so going along with that that was something we were exploring that cubic imagery exploring visual concepts so what is that it's when you uh take a motif which is a repeating pattern to inform your style that reinforces your story so for a project that we did for soul de Janeiro which is a beauty and skincare brand uh I studied the Brazilian architecture of Rio and noticed a lot of similar shapes to the product in their architecture and so I thought it would be a great visual concept to actually put the products everywhere you could see them hide them in this the city so I thought that would be really great because you're constantly looking at the the product and you're constantly thinking about the brand so you have the boom boom cream that's how you say it it's not bum bum it's boom boom we have that in the windows and we have the fragrance misted in this in the more narrow windows and we just put them everywhere so you're constantly looking at the brand and it's constantly tell telling you that story we did another big event for Kung Fu Panda that was like one of the greatest things to work on uh this was a tricky one because we had to start working on it before the movie came out and we weren't allowed to see the movie more than once so we had to like really dial it in and watch it one time and just pay attention to everything and just take it all in so but you know they eventually gave us assets but we started with sketches because that's all I really had we had um the knowledge from watching the movie I was going frame by frame in the trailer just trying to get every single piece of authentic um uh architecture and like every every detail correct so you know starting with sketches is a great way to go and that informed these pieces right here which are beautiful and we built a whole city out of these three buildings and it just looked amazing but we we started way before we had the assets we got sketches done and we were able to in the sketches point out different details we wanted to get exactly right like this uh curling arm and like this the sign getting the right angles and everything is really important so start with sketches and this is something you can do in Photoshop which I do um this was done in illustrator I like doing stuff with um architecture in illustrator because you can copy and paste the different shapes and just feels a little bit more clean to me but you can do this on like a sketch of like a piece of paper like on a back of a cocktail napkin it's all about communicating the idea to your team so speaking of Saving Time and sold aano we got approvals for gameplay simply by showing an overhead map and this is great for saving time because you know it's it's a lot easier to redraw a map than it is to you know un undo your city that you just created and you know you can do a lot of time-saving um steps just by erasing and redrawing so you don't have to change anything when you're building this is from from Soul Jano again so raise your hand if you look for reference images online of course yeah everyone does um I do the same but you know it's sometimes it's hard to find the right images and sometimes when you do find them you know it's not 100% accurate of like what you want it to be it could be like the wrong color or it could be you know just the style a little bit and that room of error is is difficult because sometimes the artists that you show it to run off in the Direction you don't want them to so it takes a time off of revisions just by drawing your own uh reference images so yeah keep keep doing those sketches create create these like concept pieces when you do something like this you can really inform your entire team what you expect out of the colors and the shapes in Crash faster um it's a band from by Morgan Tucker his band probably know him um I Illustrated every character every prop and every environment to show exactly what I wanted them to look like so if I'm painting like this like a tonal piece I'll do it in Photoshop just so I can get like that painterly quality but you can use anything free like procreate and for kingship King kingship Islands uh we received illustrations from the artists um on their team which was awesome I'm I'm constantly inspired by other artists and especially my wonderful team so we dug into the details of each drawing you know the colors the shapes and really brought it to life this whole building was my first model in a blender so traditionally I use uh Cinema 4D but the blender workflow in uh Roblox is pretty uh seamless so for the next chapter we'll be talking about building a world from Gray boxing to finding the scale then building from the player POV and finally adding a piece of you and this is from Fenty beauty skin experience that was the cream room really beautiful so there are four stages of a project uh the first is concept art the next is graybox then the art build and then the finished map now the first two stages are often skipped and you don't really need to do them but if you do you can take your project to the next level and honestly when we started this we did very little of the first two and we eventually did this more and more as our projects got Bigg and it just helped out immensely so let's dig into the details of what a gray box is gray boxing is a simplified look at your map your world everything in it as gray boxes this helps you identify locations and objects in your world it lets you play your game and see if it actually works before your scene is built so you can make decisions on do you need to move things around on the Fly and it helps plan for the next step the art build so you build your gray box and you created your world in Gray uh now you can think about the details that you might need in the scene and start replacing those gray boxes and what they represent so these images from Kung Fu Panda really shows how we went from gray box to the final now can you see all the gray boxes and what they represented and how it kind of moveed forward to the next step and then once you have your gray box you know really test it out you know scaling your experience will really help playability and increase play time which is always great so think to yourself you know what are my main gameplay areas these are what I call landmarks how many landmarks do we have and how long does it get does it take to get from one to the other because you don't want people to lose interest or get lost so put yourself in their shoes so when you're building you when you finally are moving props into your scene and you're actually building your scene it's important to put yourself in your players POV in their point of view so when I was building sets uh for stop motion at at Disney I would set the camera up and build the scene there anything that is in the scene I composed it made sure it looked really really good and just compose it from that angle so when I started in Roblox I did the same thing I was like okay where are my players going to be where are they going to spawn in what are they going to be seeing that's still how I do it today um yeah you know where your players going to be they need to know what to do where to go so really help them out and also when you're doing like thumbnails it's great you go back to these same places where you were uh composing your image you just take pictures from there you got like free thumbnails so you go from each Landmark I'm going to be here I spawn in here that looks amazing I need to go there make that prominent make sure it's like close enough go there and then look around where's the next place I need to be what's the next thing I need to do so in the world of branded experiences and yes we do a lot of them but I love them they're they're they just amazing to work with you know products and Brands and filmmakers uh finally that you know uh that you look up to I mean it doesn't it's not it's not bad getting feedback from Tim Burton I think a hero of mine that's crazy so yeah really loved working on that but yeah we do a lot of branded things and you need sometimes you have a property that you need to expand out into entire world so it's on the art director and the team to figure out like what is all of this land you know you have to put your spin on a lot of things because it's you have to make it up there's a tree but what kind of tree there's a building but what kind of building so this is where you can put your own style on it so think back on your life what kind of things excite you these are parts of you this is part of your style so you know adding a piece of view is like important because it makes your work really stand out from the rest and also um it's it's your style like no one else can do your style so I really like uh industrial architecture I like um just organic lines and concrete for some reason I really love forms made out of concrete so a lot of concrete a lot of organic shapes I think it has like this Timeless but epic quality that really makes things look Cutting Edge lighting oh everything is lighting just letting you know lighting is my freaking favorite sorry but like I mean when you you're trying to recreate these scenes from like Beetlejuice and you see the time and care it takes to like these beautiful scenes and and it makes you feel a certain way you really want to get that right when you're trying to reproduce it so um you know it's something that really means a lot to me in this section we'll go through everything that revolves around lighting storytelling with lighting the power of light cinematic lighting and my favorite lighting tricks so storytelling with light how do you want the players to feel throughout the game you know it's not just you know you can view as just a game but you know you're taking your players on a journey so it could have a beginning a middle and an end and you have to treat each like uh location as like a scene in the movie that's what I do so um if they spawn in that's like the first scene in the movie and then you move them along from on the path so you have them feel a certain way at the beginning and a certain way at the end and you kind of take them through this whole journey so how can you do that with lights you can have each of the places each of the these landmarks have a different feel take all of your levels you know make them progress in a in a different way with lighting so look at the image at the top from Fenty you know that has a certain mood so an enticing kind of magical romantic feel and that's a little bit different from what you look at when you see the rainforest on the right for soan Arrow it's got these different scenes in a movie and that contrasted with these like iconic shots from uh Beetle Juice on the bottom that I just loved making this is the waiting room and then uh this cavernous area that was in the first movie and everything just had to be right but that mood had to be there as well from the movie so you're creating these moods in these emotions now let's talk about the power of light light can instantly give the player context like instantly you know what time of day it is you set the tone you add the drama it it can guide your way and help direct the focus of your player it also can make an ordinary scene look epic now look at these two pictures the only difference is me turning off the lights and turning them back on I just turned off all of the lights I put into the scene and it's drastically different and you know without form and then you have everything on the on the bottom right so you can tell just by the lights you know what time of day it is and you kind kind of feel like I need to get from this point to that point so you kind of you have gameplay just baked in with just the lighting cinematic light lighting is not required for every game a lot of Roblox games don't need it so but this is this is how I view anything when I'm making it I come from the film background so as soon as I think about how could this look this is where my my brain goes so cinematic lighting is making your scene look like a movie and how do you achieve this if you want to um add depth with your atmosphere settings and really separate the background from uh the foreground which is something like a doing with a film camera with those settings you can even use the depth of field effect um those are just really easy ones to get in but like I love using the sun rays to create like this soft gradiation and that was one of the first things like oh that really looks like a movie when you put uh a sunset back there and it really Blends all the colors together like in Elton John right there it just cast this like gradient so it makes your flat colors look like a little bit more um blended into the scene and it's a great way a great way to start doing this if you haven't done it before and you want to is take a still from a a scene in a movie that you love and just look at analyze it where's the light what's the tone of it put it side by side in your studio and just kind of try to you know match the lighting the direction of the lighting pay attention to where the Shadows are how they're treating the color and just try to match it put those those colors in it and that's a great way to start but when you're working with Source material like stranger things like you can really analyze how they're doing it and really try to match it that was a really fun project to work on um yeah so cinematic lighting is also trying to produce a natural light and that's something that I've learned here at sorse you know doing actual uh filming on sets sometimes you have to manipulate your lighting with film lights you know sometimes you have to uh shoot something in the in dead of night and it has to look like it's the afternoon so you have to make this look um natural with very unnatural sources so one one way to make your lights in blocks look natural is by simulating global illumination so what is global illumination this is when a light is coming in and hits something and it bounces and scatters across the surface so how you can put this into practice is see the the picture here on the left this is just one light coming through the window straight in but if you see on the right here I've placed a couple of Lights one on the floor so it comes in hits the floor the you put the light on the floor and you it comes in and also bounces off the wall so I put another light on the wall now don't just quadruple all of your lights and and think that's going to solve everything it's actually might work horribly against you and it also will crash your game so don't do that it's not good for optimization it's not good for anything so um yeah just this was something big this is a big room this had a stained glass wall light coming through so if you hit that one element if you do Global illumination on this wall and the ground over here it makes everything else look way more natural so just pick a couple of different places you you do this that's important that you want people to look at lighting an interior is sometimes a challenge when you have many objects in your scene this is one of my favorite scenes in uh Beetlejuice that I worked on and it's the boiler room and um you know when you have a lot of things in your room things get really dark and uh hard to light so why don't you make it easy on yourself remove the Shadows from you know everything overhead or just anything around that area that's might be blocking or creating a really really dark room and you're going to you're going to see it really come to life and look great um so I use this um this plugin called the celestial body dragger and it helps you move your Sun or moon with your mouse which is great and I was you know for a long for the longest time I was just using the time of day and the geographic latitude and trying to dial it in but now you can just use it with um just dragging your mouse around this uh Celestial body dragger by maximum ADHD such a such a brilliant plugin the last section we're going to talk about is color and we're going to talk about color and balancing light and color and gameplay signals my father is a fine artist so I learned a lot of what I consider my my color lessons from his oil paintings just looking at his oil paintings all day and just like well how did he do that why did he do that and you know painters really really pick their colors with emotional intention and you can do that you know with with Roblox when you're creating a scene so balancing light and color seems like an easy thing to do but it's really really not um you have to remember two things your Skybox your Skybox is huge it affects every color in your scene uh so in the photo from Elton John uh at the top you see that the sun is coming through and really giving all of this the whole scene like it's warming up the Shadows it's it's changing in all of your colors to be a little bit more warm and this kind of this is great in a way but also you have to make sure that if there are colors in your scene that you need to be perfect you might have to counterbalance what it what your scene is doing with the sky box so in singland we have this this Sky Box that's pink and it's just baking this pink into everything that we're doing and I really love the the way that that feels so we broke it up with the the neon uh details but it was really interesting how that was predominantly uh the whole look of it is basically the Skybox and when you're doing things like branded uh material like we often do we have to counteract and rebalance their you know their brand colors and to make everything look like what you're going to buy or the characters you'll see in a movie so you really have to make sure that all of these brand colors you know the color of the makeup the color of the the characters in this Kung Fu Panda that they're really representative of what is trying to be um shown color and emotion I'm all about emotion um my my username heart hurts has a lot to do with emotion I I I love um things that really make you feel something I I love Pixar movies that and just makes when it tugs at your heartstrings so yeah that's that's a big thing of what I'm what I I try to do and what I what I make so do you feel a difference between these two images you know the first one is like relaxed and it makes you feel just like warm and a sense of being calm and the other one has like an electric and bold feeling and a little bit of magical I might have lit that too bright kind of looks like a nuclear bomb went off but I I love that stuff so all of these colors everything that you see here that makes you feel different ways so a trick that I use if you want to make something a little softer and more relaxed like the one on the left is by limiting your color palette and try to choose a couple of different colors let like two or three and you'll see that like it produces different effects sometimes if you have one color it has like this really like uh very dramatic feel but sometimes it it calls for it so try that out so in the left we have creams brown and pink and I feel like my character standing in there is all aesthetic as well with the pink popsicle and the the B's head that's brown it's always good okay lastly color for gameplay so this was a tricky one for me coming from film so for this one I was trying to do kind of like Sin City I don't know if you kind of know that that movie but like it was going for like a bold like comic uh look and just like shoved a bunch of saturated lights in the scene and you know color for gameplay is imperative it helps the player navigate your map and it directs them where to go but this is very tricky when you're trying to do something kind of freaky with the color to begin with and um you know bright lights that are saturated will people will kind of look for cues uh when they're playing and you know if something's red or something's green or something's blue sometimes that stuff means stuff to people especially when you're coming from other games that do it so well so you got to make sure that you're being cognizant of what colors that you're using for uh kingship Islands I I had all my whole style here I was like this looks so cool man the whole thing is perfect and then we started uh gameplay testing and people were like hopping around and like doing crazy stuff and like they're avoiding different areas they're like running into the bushes and I'm like this is obviously not what we want we want you to collect these things on the ground why are you guys acting so so weird and they're like well that's obviously lava over there something's going to explode or something's going to burn me and I'm going to die so I'm avoiding that and I'm running into the bushes cuz I don't know why but there's green over there so you got to keep in mind all of this stuff affects them you want to help the player as much as possible help them help you um really help them play their game H the way you want it to so here's some takeaways from my art process remember to find those visual concepts while doing concept art uh sketch things out to save time build your world from the players POV and add a special piece of you tell a cinematic story with lighting and balance color and light for an emotional response and these are just some of the many things that I've learned finding my art Direction and now it's time to find yours so what direction will you go next thank you so much and I'd love to answer some of your questions the saw hor is representing right now oh my gosh the really talented people in the room even you guys too I'm so excited you guys are here is anybody any questions nothing too technical please um hi uh what made you make the switch um from the animation industry to the video game industry those two guys right there oh yeah they made no no every like it was a big initiative over at saor like who we want to make these games who's passionate about gaming and all of our hands went up so how it was really hard to see who was going to stick around to do post- production um but no we're we're really you know strong on both ends now we have a big post production Department that helps us with our gameplay as well so once we have our entire uh project launching we have the the team in post- production uh creating all the promotional material uh for social and it's it's really awesome we just started doing like tutorials video tutorials on how to play our game which is super amazing so I'm excited about that but what made me I love video games I was actually traumatized by video games when I was little uh my father the the fine artist he didn't let me have a Nintendo or any gaming system until I was 18 years old wow so now I'm making games for a living dad anybody else I hope this is not too technical um you were talking about lights about how many of them can ring performance and I was wondering if you have a recommendation on what's like the limit of lights that you should have in a scene if you want to analyze the first couple games that I made don't do that we did uh yeah I I think you know I think you know when it's too much but um I would say it depends really like how how big your environment is and what you need to do I would say error on this the this at least you need to do um I would go back once you've completed your scene and turn them on and off and see if you really need them and this really comes in handy for optimizing but you know I forgot to mention but there's a plug in by woot 3 that's this uh the lighting editor and that was um something that I use every like 20 minutes it's a very powerful plugin it shows you where all of your lights are and um what type of light what color it is and it really helps you troubleshoot if if anything's like really bright and you're like why is that just nuclear and you can just see like oh when you click it on it shows you all the lights and like oh I put like 18 lights right there that's probably it so um I'm trying to give you like a good estimate I would say well the the information that I got from the devs is you don't want the there's a radius or diameter of the light coming out you don't want those to kind of cross over each other although I do it all the time and I love doing it I love giant lights I like stretching it all the way to 60 and just like putting uh whatever feels right there and then remove what's not what what's not needed I did I help so you don't say to yourself I'm going to only add four lights you add as many as you can then check the plugin and as many as necessary not as many as I can I've been hit on the arm too many times for doing that thank you yeah hi uh firstly I just want to say that I'm Brazilian and your pronunciation for boom boom it's spot on thank you thank you validation I love it uh I just wanted to know how do you communicate the our Direction with the rest of the team like do you uh bital uh Bibles or uh documents oh yes oh so communicating um one of the I have a couple things for that I really think communicating with your team is important um Team morale is really important when you're starting some big uh you know project that has that everyone's excited about the people that know about it are excited about it's really great to have like a like a welcoming um like uh meeting with them and just gather them around and really get people hyped on what it is some people might know certain parts certain details about the project is this a musical or is this a you know a movie and um it's really cool to get them all excited about it at the same time and also introduce each team member to each other as far as workflow is concerned uh milanote is something that I use personally we've used a a couple of different things but I like to lay things out in there um why do I like doing that uh it's on a grid system and it makes everything really clean and then you can also put all your images in there and you can zoom way in and so you can put a whole bunch of stuff in there um you can always copy and P I think you can copy and paste uh pictures as well which is not easy to do with um other apps um do you use Milan oute uh usually I use Jam for it okay yeah that's that's great too we use that on other projects but um with my mindset I feel like Milano helps me really well and then um as far as like workflow sometimes we just do um on some projects all of the uh tasks map it out in in Milano but then we also use Jura as well when it gets a little crunchier yeah thank you yeah anybody else over here nobody's want to see me dance so this is a question regarding Lamborghini Labs a project the headquarters building was that a design that you yourself and the team concepted or was it one that Lamborghini gave to you and if so what was the inspiration for it okay so a lot of that is just uh stuff I I love uh that I you know for when you when you're pitching this stuff out you you know at salor we like to build it to what we think it would look like at the very beginning and really pitch the final product and um that was something uh that I worked with uh this very talented artist Santiago to make and he he works out of Colombia and we just you know giggle every morning and like um make beautiful things and it just came out of a little bit of exploration we wanted it to be epic we wanted it to be like um the most you know exciting thing that could be that could house the Lamborghini I thought it's pretty epic to put it in a desert and a lot of their promotional material there's a little bit of um there's uh there was a lot of um elements from the promotional material that we kind of bit off of as well but yeah a little bit of everything thank you thank you so much thanks for coming out I appreciate it so much thank you [Music] oh