Life Drawing : no1

Once a week we usually bring in a model into the studio to draw. I've always been into concept art and doodling but find realistic anatomy and proportions quite a challange. Wish I had some of my older life drawings as I'm sure I've improved over the last few months. THIS is why I created this blog!

Education : no1 'Focus spots'

I once asked someone at work to explain in under 60 seconds what makes a texture good, he doodled the following within 30seconds, no words. These pictures won't turn you into a great texture artist over night but I think its a very simple visual way to explain a fundamental rule of texturing.



The first example is a stone texture. I know, it looks JUST like stone. The second example was made up by myself as a continuation of the first example. It is wood and yes again it looks JUST like wood. Lesson is that this simply isn't enough. Notice how if you look at the bad examples your eye looks at the texture map as a whole where at in the good example your eyes focus on the interesting areas one by one? (orange dots or connecting cracks depending on the example) while the boring but wonderful base texture acts as 'background'.

Introduction :

So who and what is caponeart? and why is there now a blog?

So, caponeart is art that can only be created myself, Adam Capone. I created art for quite some time before developing it further for around 8 years after school and finally landed my first job at Streamline Studios as a texture artist working on various videogames, where I soon discovered that infact my art skills were a bit rubbish compared to my new peers. Luckily for me my apparant dedication and potential outweighed my character mesh that had too many loops around the mouth and that hideously monotone texture on my underground subway environment.

At my current workplace we have this routine of writing up a daily report that explains what we did, encounters we had, problems we have and you're free to include comments about where the project is going. These are stored in a simple network area and are easy to navigate. During long projects it's interesting to go back and see these issues you had day by day and how it unfolded.

'Skip to the end?' Ok so the creation of this blog came about while mulling over the idea of a 'daily' report that covers my career as a whole. Now that should be an interesting read in many years to come.

During the blog I hope to talk about past, present and future in regards to my career in games, my love of art in games and educational tips on texturing, in games.