[arttorney]

Let's have fun!

I am going to start this off as an activity with two weeks to finish. I know many of you can finish in one, but others have day job pressures or feel they cannot draw a finished enough piece in one week. I want to make sure everybody has plenty of time to be comfortable. This activity is all about the worlds themselves; the places that a game, movie, or book cover may come to. Do not emphasize characters or creatures. We have other activities for that. I know sometimes a few figures out there in the distance can give an idea of scale, and it is OK to do that. Your drawing had better be all about the place instead of those figures, though.

Please post all images using CGHUB's attachment manager and keep the images at a reasonable size (I'm talking about perhaps 800 to 1000 across the top, max). I am open to help out new folks if they are having trouble figuring out how to work with their images. Admin has provided this excellent tutorial about how to attach things: http://cghub.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2248

Further instructions will be found in the "New Worlds #1" thread.

[arttorney]

For those of you new to landscape work, a good traditional approach is to have a foreground, a middle ground, and a background in the picture plane. This feels comfortable to the viewer and helps draw their mind into the world you are creating.

How do our eyes and brain sort out all this information? How can we tell the foreground from the background? In a word: perspective. Perspective is about more than the geometric lines going to vanishing points that you may have come to dread in Drawing I. Those are a tool used to help you ensure the far things are smaller while the near things are larger (which is admittedly one of the best tools in your arsenal for showing distance and scale). Found for us by Diarum are this 2 point perspective and this 1 point perspective tutorial. Beware: the 2 point one is a slower loading .pdf file (but it's from Harvard).

Don't forget that perspective also includes atmospheric perspective. Distances can be vast in a landscape and particulate matter or moisture in the air create an effect where things farther away get softer edges, shift toward the blue, and exhibit a compressed range of values.

I'm not really all that much of a whiz at this stuff and I think this could become a useful informative thread if people in general share their knowledge and experiences. Diarum already found for us this Landscape Composition tutorial and placed it in the education section of the forums. I brought a link over here on general principle.

[arttorney]

Everybody: A big thanks goes out to Trashy for a lot of hard work he did making us cool sticky thumbnails, activity banner, and winners board.

[netocg]

Reading a book about Character Design, i found a chapter about aliens, and some question about his planets/enviroment and solar system.
That questions can be asked to give ideas of what type of creature can live or survive there.
"Ask about habitat for inhumanity:
1. type of sun the world revolves around(if there is indeed a sun for the home)
2. Number of suns the world has and their types
3. Size of planet
4. Existence or nonexistence of solid surface
5. Crust(earth component) and its composition and quantily and stability
6. Moons, rings, and other planetary accouterments
7. Atmosphere (or lack of) and type of gases available
8. Liquid components of environment (lakes, oceans, rivers) and what the liquid consists of
9. Temperature range (surface, atmosphere, night/day)
10. Volcanism
11. Weather
12. Seasons
13. Orbital period and eccentricities in same
14. Plate tectonics
15. Atmospheric winds and their frequency, velocity, and so on.
16. Age of the world and its status within a solar system.
17. Rogue worlds that have no attached sun or other physical "systems"
18. Distance from center of galaxy, or position with star clusters or other types of multistar systems, or completely separate from any star system
19. Stellar neighborhood issues (gas or dust clouds, comets, asteroids/meteors, radiation, gamma ray bursts)
20. gravitational field (pull) of the planet
21. Atmospheric density
22. Rotational period of planet

About creature:
1. Core Structure: organic/inorganic
2. locomotion
3. habitat
4. Food (animal, vegetebla, or mineral)
5. Attack/defense modes
6. Sentience
7. Reproduction
8. Culture"
This are information from the book: Hedgpeth&Missal, A Step-by-Step Guide to Designing & Developing Characters for Visual Media, New York: Delmar 2006.

[arttorney]

This is the new plagiarism FAQ for the forums. We hope it will provide insight and answer questions concerning what is an acceptable use of reference.
This covers plagiarism, tracing, and other issues we have been encountering recently in the activities. While we have not caught anybody in New Worlds, I do not intend for anybody ever to think they can start. I specifically discussed our openness in this activity to 3d program usage with the upper management and doing that remains OK. It is still drawing as long as you are not tracing a reference you have stashed in a lower layer.

[RANT]Tracing a photograph whether with a pencil or a program is NOT OK. Tracing somebody else's drawing is very definitely NOT OK. Tracing your own drawing is not even OK, since the entries to these activities are to be made specifically for these activities and are not to be drawings you made last year that you figure fit the brief. [/RANT]

[obiwandk]

is gona join this next comp but when do it starts

[arttorney]

Please do not vote for yourselves in this activity. That adds no information. We already know that you like your own work. That is why you draw.