Visual Design - Game Design Essentials - page 91

Out There is a funny, lighthearted adventure about mild-mannered Price, who
travels the world with his uncle. He literally falls into one escapade after another
from the dilapidated balloon they travel in. As quaint, sweet, and nonthreaten-
ing as Weldon appears, his origins were strongly influenced by the conceptual
methods H. R. Giger used while creating his award-winning monster for the
ilm Alien.
Giger's frightening creation was built on a design from an earlier painting
he had done called Necronom IV and was further designed based on studies he
made of old Rolls Royce parts, rib bones, and snake vertebrae.
What inspired Sterling about that process was how Giger was able to study
shapes and create such a fantastic creature. So what shape did Sterling
settle on?
A peanut.
Sterling felt it was an odd shape and might work, so he used that shape to
design Weldon Price.
Not all of Sterling's work is based on such simple concepts. In a project called
The Red Bedspread that he is working on with fellow writer Karen Soliday, the
lead character, named Henry Theodore Finch, is a little boy about 5 or 6 years
old who overhears his dad talking about how he lost his job.
Believing this “job” is some sort of tangible object that his dad misplaced, he
puts on a cape (the red bedspread) and searches all over town for the object. The
character design and environments are more complex, which suits this charac-
ter, who must go through the emotional ups and downs of helping his unhappy
father. Sterling wanted to have the character interact with a more complex
background as well, so he designed the initial layouts, shown in Figure 4.6, in
3ds Max. The image appears gray because it has not been painted with color or
texture yet.
The character of H. T. Finch is certainly more complex than Sterling's Weldon
Price character. He sports Chuck Taylor shoes along with tape holding his thick
glasses together, to help show his vulnerability. The character was generated as
a pencil sketch and composited over the background on a layer in Photoshop.
The character and background were then painted out completely in Photoshop,
and Sterling was able to use the shading of the shapes he had created in 3ds Max
to help paint a believable world with correct perspective. Figure 4.7 shows the
final render.