In this course you will explore concepts and approaches involved in creating successful character designs that can be applied to video games. Following a first week delving into some foundational concepts for successful character design, each of the remaining three weeks are structured as a master class where you will observe three professional character designers at work in the studio: Andy Ristaino (Adventure Time), Jacky Ke Jiang (Journey), and Robertryan Cory (SpongeBob SquarePants). Each designer will take on two different design challenges on the fly and address the various issues in designing characters for games, such as movement, expression, and technical limitations. At the end of each week you will have an opportunity to try out some of the concepts from that week's lesson on characters of your own design. This is a fun and engaging class especially useful for students interested in animation in film and TV as well as games, and is suitable for students of any drawing ability.
2D Ink Drawing
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Del curso dictado por California Institute of the Arts
Character Design for Video Games
577 calificaciones
California Institute of the Arts
577 calificaciones
Curso 4 de 5 en SpecializationGame Design: Art and Concepts
De la lección
Week 3: Design with Purpose
This week, we visit Jacky Ke Jiang, an animator who has worked as a character designer for both Disney Feature Animation and in video games. Jacky will discuss working in both 2D and 3D modes as he completes his challenges.
Conoce a los instructores
Fran KrauseFaculty, Character Animation
School of Film/Video
Hi My name's Jackie Kajong.
And I work at a game company as an art director for quite a while now.
Three years.
Now I'm doing the demo with drawings.
Usually I start with just a very simple initial idea.
Sometimes I don't have any idea.
I would just say okay make up an idea when I draw.
So I don't really start with a lot of ideas in my head.
I usually just start doing it.
Kind of like a dance and music.
You just start to feel the mood and the beats and you start drawing.
And then eventually,
once I put down a line I would realize oh no this line is totally horrible.
Now I have to add another line.
To make the first line seem intentional.
Oh, the second line's messed up again.
Let's keep going.
Hey its starting to look like a figure.
[LAUGH] Maybe that's how life should pan out.
So that's kind of how I drew is just always reacting to the previous line.
So it's kind of like a hide and seek chess game with myself.
So eventually I end up filling the whole page.
It's like okay, now it's done, cuz [LAUGH] there's no more line can be added.
So I can just start drawing a mission commander.
Thank you for the reference.
I guess it's kinda like how you create any kind of music in your garage.
It just started with some simple rhythm, beats, see what fits.
By the time you finish your 10,000th hour of drawing practice.
You probably already have some pre-existing notion of
how things should go.
And so when you start drawing, you just know exactly what you do.
Sometimes you don't really need to think.
But if you start overthinking it, you're putting your ego on the line.
You start over editing things and things start to become dittering.
So I started with a very serious man.
But I started thinking, okay you're setting this back in the 60s.
So things need to be slightly happier, so I add the leg a little.
Laughing, teasing, side.
So, it's definitely over thinking.
If I over think it, I will probably start as a very cartoony design.
But, just like the whole human history evolves and are recorded.
We don't really know exactly where humans going to go.
So we're always on the verge of trial and error.
If they don't look like they're from the 60s, I'll just add some 60s groove to it.
But right now they don't really look like 60s.
I guess one thing we can make it look like 60s.
When I think of 60s I think of two ways.
You have the pop culture version of the 60s.
And then you have the legit hardcore science of the 60s.
Like the 60s, the beginning of the space age.
So, a lot of very simple machinery and
computer was rising.
So that's the serious science of it.
So, the designs seem to be bulkier and complex, in a way.
Like right now you think about any kind of user interface.
You have a touch screen and
the buttons super simple because you can display all kind of art.
But back in the 60's, people tend to layout every single options on the table.
Because that's how, that's how like anyone would, kind of like how you know those
recording sound studios have all kinds of crazy buttons.
Because they don't know how to consolidate into a smaller amount.
So that's how I felt about this.
In the grander scheme of things, a lot of repeating patterns,
which is very interesting and nice to look at.
You have the bands between the repeating pattern from nature,
from all the Ecstasies and drug experience.
Oh, and that's the other big part about the 60s.
You have the hippie movement.
And then you have the machinery's from the 60s,
which is like the mega version of the 50s.
That's the other thing about any period of time is.
There's a lot of things you notice from different time periods.
They look super odd and weird.
It doesn't feel like it belongs to that period.
Those things tend to stand out to me.
Versus, oh if you think about 1960s there are certain shapes you always think of.
To me that seems like a low-hanging fruit to please the audience, very simply.
It's the fast food way of pleasing the audience.
>> Like putting the Eiffel tower in the background.
So you know you're in Paris?
>> Exactly.
Very well put.
So I prefer to give player a visual puzzle,
in the way like you have to think a little bit more.
Cuz the more you think, the more you're worrying it is.
But you wanna give them a low entry point.
It's like, a good game design is always easy to get into and harder to master.
That goes to everything I think.
>> You mean with game play?
>> A game play, yes.
As you can see, I'm not really going towards any exact styles.
I'm kinda, just go as what I felt like is right in the moment.
So that's how you created your personal unique style I guess.
>> How many different designs do you think you usually come up with as you're trying
to figure out a certain character?
>> Like I said, I usually don't overthink things.
What I put when I'm drawing I say this is a good design.
If it doesn't work then I will make something up, a new design for
a different story.
I guess,
it's like a very ground-up approach to make things instead of having the idea of.
Okay, this is the character it's supposed to be.
This is the storyline, this is how the character needs to act and
express certain emotion.
I just start drawing and then the drawing will tell me what the character is.
And what the character wants to be and how the character needs to feel.
And now it's just like oh okay you want to go this way I will facilitate.
It's almost like you become the slave to your drawing in a way.
Like also that's to me, drawing is not too much of a professional
practice, to me personally is a very spiritual and meditative kinda idea.
It's just like a perfect opportunity to let my ego go.
To see what my body can do without controlling it too much.
I feel like we as artists, we're dealing with a lot of noise in the world.
Our job is to be a filter.
To filter through all the noises and find a good part to
manifest a universal pattern in some way.
So that's why an artist needs to practice so many drawings,
is just to get familiar with his medium.
So, the more you do it, the less it becomes a thinking process.
The more it becomes a muscle memory process.
>> Could you talk a bit about how you get your environment right for
you to draw creatively?
>> To get environment right,
I guess I loosely have a somewhat of a fixed perspective in mind.
It's like I see usually I have the point a view either from you're eye view,
eye level or I like to do more of a diagram.
It's like because I do a lot of 3D.
So I really love the 45 degree tilted view.
Kind of like a building diagram.
>> Is it lithographic?
>> Yeah, yeah, that's the world.
[LAUGH] So basically, I feel that instantly
creates agreement between you and the audience.
Because the audience won't feel like oh, this is just crazy randomness.
I can't really find any pattern.
I think a good, successful art piece should allow the audience to enter.
But dazzle them and create some kind of things surprising them.
So, if they're drawing without if the drawing has a lack of structure and
perspective.
Usually it will turn the audience off,
because then your consciousness directly goes into oh this is a bad joint.
So I'm gonna move onto the next piece.
So if you get your structure correct it doesn't have to be accurate
to a three point perspective, or any scientific perspective.
You have to establish a rule in the very beginning.
You have to let the audience know what the rule is.
And you want to follow that rule, very gratefully, and truthfully.
And stick to the rule, because that is to me is a respect to the audience.
If you can respect the rule.
But you can bend the rule, and somehow trick the audience.
Oh, I didn't think this way, but
it's still follows the rule that you established in the beginning.
That's where I think a good successful art piece comes from.
>> What kind of rules do you work with?
>> Let's see what kind of rule.
Oops. I will make that into something else.
I think the rule I want to work with, like I said in the beginning, is perspective.
Secondly, I'm working with a black ink.
Pen and a white paper.
So the rule, it's like a building rule.
It's very simple.
And there's a border of the frame.
That is also another rule.
I won't draw out of the paper.
So that's the kind of rule I follow.
It's very basic.
>> How do you know when you're done with a drawing?
Because I notice you draw a lot of detail.
And for me it's difficult to add detail, because I could add detail forever.
>> Yeah. >> How do you know when a drawing is done?
Or how do you know that you like it?
>> I think it's a discipline again.
It's kinda like a rule discipline.
You can always add detail yes.
But once you establish the density between two inclines.
You want to follow strictly that line density.
You don't want to have one anomaly out of everything.
It's all comes boil down to pattern matching in a way.
Like if you did one thing in your drawing, that thing's very special.
You want to do it again somewhere else,
but have a slight different variation of it.
So do you understand any of this?
It's kind of abstract in a way.
>> It's definitely abstract but it's.
>> It's almost in a way very scientific.
Like if you have something on page, you wanna repeat that pattern somewhere else.
But not too much, cuz you wanna have.
Another rule is a rule of three.
You have the one major focus and
then you have the secondary focus and then you have a third.
So you follow a rule of that.
I'm trying to figure out the rule myself.
Based on my feeling of, oh yeah, this drawing looks nicer than the other one.
Why?
And then he started to try to find the rule.
>> So the rules aren't used to set up your drawing.
They're used to solve problems that you see in the drawing?
>> Yeah, that's the other thing I learned over the years is a good
artist should learn how to constantly contradict himself.
Like, I establish a rule and then I realize the rule is not the rule.
There is no rule.
[LAUGH] So, it's a very weird zen exercise.
So, I'm just as excited to see this drawing as you.
That's the other thing about drawing is once you have the rule all set up and
you know exactly what to do.
You usually kill the magic.
A little bit.
You kind of want to be curious about what you're gonna do.
Just have that child sense of wonder is very important to drawing because
ultimately what we are doing is playing.
>> How do you change your approach when you feel yourself getting bored with
you're project.
>> Let's see.
How do I change my way of, I guess I listen to podcast and
music and see if that will add something to the mix.
So it become, when something you realize it becomes boring to you.
It's usually because all the rules are dry, and all the lines are set up.
This also goes back to a quite interesting how video game
level designer would design a level.
Is you would never wanna establish just one straight line in front of you and
then there's a beacon.
Cuz nobody would wanna just walk like a boring straight line
all the way to the end, spanning five minutes.
You wanna make it windy, you want to create interest and
decoration along the side.
So I think that's the, there's a little bit of truth in that.
It's kind of life.
Everybody is raising from birth to death.
But it's what's in between that matters the most.
So sometimes you feel like your life is boring.
Maybe you should just go to a different place.
But we all know the ultimate goal is become dust in
the facilitate other part of life.
So it's all about how you think.
If the work itself become boring to you.
Maybe you can focus on the exercise of focusing on the music
that creates something more interesting.
>> Right.
So you're actually thinking about producing this game in 3D.
>> We'll just, as a setup for this exercise.
>> I see.
Then I will totally draw it a different way.
Because this level of line work and detail is going to be very hard to produce in 3D.
Although you can do like what Borderline, that video game does.
By creating like a ink texture mapping.
But that would require a lot of time.
I think the best simple CG solution would be using flash heating.
Then that means it's totally a different design.
I would just start playing with shapes in Photoshop instead.
I will give him really small legs so it's simpler to draw.
When I'm working the computer I sketch out.
I started with just some simple doodling in Photoshop.
Just big brush strokes and play with simple shapes.
Shape language was always very important.
When I was working at Disney feature.
They were always talking about straight versus curve.
The harmony between different shapes.
And I'm sure you guys talk about that a lot everywhere.
So, looks like I smeared a little bit here, I got some weird thing here.
So what I will do is I'll make that into a part of the art.
So it looks intentional.
I do that all of the time.
>> Could you explain a bit about,
like you have your time card animation and your sketch books?
I see you post sketch books almost everyday.
>> Yep.
>> On Facebook and Instagram I'm guessing.
>> It's kind of like a diary.
[LAUGH] Or journal.
You probably want to be manly sounding.
>> [LAUGH]
>> [LAUGH] >> Cool.
How does that affect your art and the way your work on things?
>> How does it affect?
I guess it's just to me, I just feel like I'm more of an artist this way.
I can live and breathe in art.
So whenever I feel like there's an idea I want to think of,
or maybe I have no idea, just want to mediate and just do a drawing.
To me, it's just kind of makes me happy when people like what my output is.
Why do you work with Ink?
Cuz I noticed you're almost exclusively ink,
because there's not a lot of colored pencils, or mechanical pencils.
>> I used to do pencils, but then I just got lazy.
I was like, why not just make the statement clean and simple.
In a way, each material art tool you use has its own rhythm and
the quality.
And, I think they're just patterns.
What really matters is the idea and truth and theme of the thing.
So you can say it.
It's like, different tools, like different language.
You can express the same feeling or idea with different language.
So what I like is to choose something simple so people have less learning curve.
Does Mars have those canyon with rings on them?
>> Craters?
>> Yeah, the craters?
>> Mm-hm.
Not as much as the moon.
>> Not as much? Okay.
>> Good enough.
>> Heh.
I don't know what Mars looks like.
I've never been to Mars.
So, I'm just gonna say this is Mars.
I guess this is the one with the drawing.
The dance battle between the robot, and the astronaut.
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