Battle.net

Character/Enemy Concepts

How much do you as artists find yourselves influenced by other fantasy series or artists?

Environment Concepts:

What in your imagination allows you to come up with such bizarre ideas of plant/animal life on strange planets? What kinds of things do you derive your ideas from to create the amazing worlds that we as players visit?

Digital painting

(In painter / photoshop / etc) Do you prefer to paint with the default hard round with opacity and pen pressure or are you a fan of custom texture brushes?

3D Studio Max Sculpting and Environment Modeling/Textures

How much design freedom are artists lower on the totem pole given in prop and set piece design? Are the concept artists providing concepts for even the smallest crates and barrels or is a general theme designed and the actual prop/env. artists allowed to run with it, with supervisor approval?

How important are triangle counts in your design philosophy? Given the dire task of getting the game art efficiently running on such a wide range of hardware platforms, are triangle counts closely watched or are simple ranges provided? (i.e. 500 triangles for small props, 1000 for minor set pieces, etc).

Are silhouettes as important for environment pieces as they are for characters in the WoW art style?

/Environment Artist
//Legitimately interested to know how the design process works mentally and technically at Blizzard
///Have and will always love the art style

Traditional Drawing

What percentage of the work is digital now? Is lead and paper still the basis of everything, or do some artists start straight off the tablet?

Character/Enemy Concepts:

How dramatically do your concepts change in the process of paper and pencil to in-game material? Have you ever had a great idea you really, really loved fall apart in said process and can you give an example of what we missed out on?

Character/Enemy Concepts

As a professional paletonologist and comparative anatomist, I sometimes find the models and morphology of them to be a little stale at times, sometimes featuring bits of morphology that don't make sense or fit. When designing a model/unit/character, what process is used to determine its appearance from start to finish? Is it more based on amazing art concepts that developers work around to create the unit or is there a larger component of "form and function" creating the appearance based on a recognized niche within the species or race?

Examples would be fantastic.

3DMAX Sculpting

Have you ever noticed that Taurens don't have the right proportions? Maybe you should make them more cow like :)

Zbrush Sculpting:
Once an artist has completed a high poly sculpt what is your method of creating a low poly model? Retoping in zbrush or just building a model around an imported sculpt into max/maya?

Environment Modeling/Textures:
When doing props for WoW do you bake out AO maps for a starting point when painting your texture maps?
Do you use only standard brushes in Photoshop or do you also use custom brushes when painting textures?

World of Warcraft Trading Card Game Art:
Can Blizzard employee's submit art to the TCG?

Traditional Drawing & Character/ Enemy Concepts

As a mostly traditional artist myself, my first introduction to Blizzard Entertainment's art was the pencil sketches Samwise Didier did of WarCraft 2 and StarCraft. That got me into art and made me buy all the art related products of WarCraft/ StarCraft and Diablo I could get my hands on.

I've recently started with digital drawing as well, but my love for pencil drawings still burn in my soul - I'm set to become an concept artist (for Blizzard, that's the dream) and I was wondering in the world of art, especially a leading company as yourself, do you look over pencil drawings and aim for the digital approach or is there still hope for a more traditional artist to become an concept artist?

Why are the Terran models in SC2 so much better than anything else?

Character/Enemy concepts.

How often do you receive specific requests from the design department? What techniques do you use when drawing someone else's idea?

Character/Enemy Concepts:

How long do you spend working on each individual concept for characters in the game?

How much tweaking and changing do your concepts undergo before they are modeled into the game?

((Last sentence for the tl:dr version))

Character Modeling/Textures

Recently, many players on the forums have been asking for player model updates.
Over the summer, I created a Constructive Compendium addressing various aspects surrounding Model updates. (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2674642575?page=1#0 )

The general feeling is that Warcrafts heroes, like Thrall or Sylvanas, are making the player themselves look outdated.

If and when models are updated, will there be focus on retaining previous facial 'looks' (like Vague ethnicity, face emotions) through the update?

If you got what they want you are hired. I don't have what they want. My art skills didn't make it past preschool years. I'm serious, I suck at drawing and it really gets me so angry. I see the art work that's posted all over these sites and I just get so jealous.

I'll ask them myself this year but..

•Character Modeling/Textures

Why wont you make 2 handed weapons big again?

Character Modeling/Textures

There have been many requests to update the current player models. You have previously stated that there is much more going into new models, like the Worgen or Goblins than older ones like Humans and Orcs.

Aside from obvious increases in poly-count, what has changed about creating new player models?

-Environment Concepts

-Environment Modeling/Textures

I walk by a lamp in Gilneas

how long did it take, from drawing up the concepts for a kind of lamp that would fit the Gilnean theme, to making a fully rendered 3d model of that lamp, to create one lamp for one area in a video game (that is created according to the quality standards of blizzard of course).

I do love to draw, and on occasion I do draw concept work for some graphic novel idea or some outlandish animation I want to one day create. But for a big company, I wonder how long does it take for concept art to eventually become a finalized, quality standard approved piece of work?