20200930 How I Did The Ark Lockdown Promo Art
So I thought I was going to be doing a basic render for a lighting pass and then paint over it, but I quickly realised that my painting sucks too much to be able to execute that quickly.
This was a commission and normally you would do at least one thing you’d done before when delivering on a job, right? Not this time. This was my first complete Blender modelling project and my first Deep Dream thing.
Here’s how we did it:
Step Zero: Thumbnailing I new pretty quickly that I wanted to do an opposing perspective to the original card art. If they go low, I go high.
Step One: The Modelling (two and a half days work, three days of inhaling tutorials) I had used Blender briefly in 2011. It was rough entry and I bounced off it then. Earlier this year, some friend-animators from my workspace were extolling the joys of v2.8 and its accessibility. After getting across a bunch of Maciej Kucera and Onepixelbrush and Ash Thorp content about kit bashing and concept work last year I figured “worst case, I’ll just buy some cheap models and smoosh them together”.
Turns out, modelling the Gila Hands Arcology was the most exciting art-thing I’ve done in ages. And I did it badly! But fixing those mistakes and learning new techniques to solve problems as I went was the perfect way to go. I’ll bake my donut later.
The drones and city were pulled from free .obj files online. They were decimated (what a cool tool!) and remodelled and extended.
I’m keen to properly model a bunch of Android universe stuff so that people can get do this same thing themselves, if they like.
I love how hard and scientific 3D can be too. Finally, something that actively uses all of the parts of my brain! Good to be a polymath!
Step Two: The Collage & Dreaming (one day) So yeah, I couldn’t paint, but I knew that other Netrunner artists had, highly thematically, been working with Deep Dream tech. After dating around some different online neural network art tools, the Deep Dream Generator proved the most versatile and effective. I had to sign up to the Patreon to get a higher resolution output but that seems fair enough. I can imagine that being able to put a cap on the different supporters at each tier allows them to temper the demand on their robot art brain.
The texture and colour images were sourced from work on ArtStation of similar subjects in roughly similar lighting conditions. There’s a lot of scope to try hard here, and/or in the next step.
I figured what I did here was fair uses since you would have no idea what the source imagery was unless someone told you. It’s almost impossible to prove someone used your work in this sort of thing. Fully expect someone to make a copyright claim use of their original art in another AI art and have it go big in The Discourse for a minute or two before people go back to the rampant theft that typefies modern creative work.
Step Three: The Tweaking (one hour) So it turns out that cleaning up the quirks of DDG is very possible in Photoshop with distortion and retouching tools. I highly recommend it. Also, doing a few different colour DDG renders and overlaying heavily featered masks works nicely too.
Step Four: The Design (half day) The templating of the card was based off the FFG promo for another operation: BOOM!
NISEI don’t share their toys so I had to make my own graphic assets from scratch. The main points where this slowed me down were the faction logo and the card cost. We survived though.
The HB logo is just the faction acronym in Eurostile (font of the future!) and was originally supposed to just be a place holder. Turns out, like all things in Eurostile, it has a really nice carriage (in the general sense) to it and it matches the reference form closely enough that it plays as is.
As a filthy modernist, I stuck with a flatter and cleaner look than FFG used, and flatter still than NISEI. There is some skewmorphism on the card cost/credit portion of the card. To the familiar, it’d look kinda weird without it. I went with a diamond rather than a circle for the credit cost circle break because it leans closer to the FFG credit symbol. Otherwise, I like the way NISEI adapted the iconic FFG card cost form.
The faction cost gave me a headache at first. I was trying hard for some bevelling and sine on the influence pips but, in the end, the low scale of it that I was struggling with made it clear that clarity itself was the name of the game. Less is more. Especially with high contrast colour blocking.
Brushed metal textures over the text backgrounds because they’re the engineering and minufacturing faction.
Falvour text to be COVID relevant by yours truly also. Was tempted to go with “Now, more than ever…” or “We’re all staying at home, together, so we can stay together.” Or one of those nonsense pro-unity word jumbles (though I do honestly love some social unity).
Final Thoughts This would be much faster to do a second time, since all of this was very exploratory. I like the workflow. I like that being a Blender hero makes everything so many things possible. And I like my card template. Don;t be surprised if I do some more custom Netrunner art.