Hi, this is not Jade, this is Finn. I’m one of the artists currently working on Begraved!
We are a team of four Futuregames students (A Swedish games college) on an internship placement at Gripjaw, as the practical part of our Game Artist education.
My “area of expertise” is 3D character art, which includes basically anything that can move. I create outfits, NPCs, cute creatures and monsters. Today I’ll be taking you on a little journey through my process, from messy sketches to functional, game ready 3D models!
At Gripjaw we are very lucky to have a lot of freedom in what we create, even as interns! My process usually starts with a simple idea, either something that the game needs or something the team thinks would be fun to have. From there, I gather lots of reference images to draw inspiration from and start sketching my interpretations of the idea. The concept art stage of any project can get a bit messy, and sometimes that can lead to great accidents. For example, The maid outfit, which you can get as a reward for playing the Begraved Demo, was something I came up with while working on designs for some regular graverobber suits.
Once I have an idea sketched out, to a point where I can understand the general shape of what I’ll be modelling, I open up Blender and delete the default cube. Then I start modelling.
In the case of the player character suits I use our existing graverobber model as a base to work on top of.
The last stage of the process (my personal favorite) is texturing. This is where I get to go crazy painting on top of my model.
Throughout the process we go back and forth with the team, giving each other feedback and making small tweaks along the way. We have daily meetings to make sure everyone can voice their opinions and receive the support they need. So far, working at Gripjaw has been very fun and exciting! The team is full of awesome and insanely talented people, but I think the most rewarding part is seeing players enjoy what we create. Personally, I think I look forward to adding more familiars/creatures to Begraved most. I really enjoy creating cute little guys.
Outside of Begraved I enjoy working on heavily stylised characters and props, and especially weapons. I love a good ol’ chunky axe, that looks like you could give someone a proper whack with it.
But axes are quite useless if there is nobody to wield them!
Some of my personal projects are created based on concept art by other artists I admire. It’s great practice for getting proportions, colors and different art styles correctly.
In my free time I like to get away from the computer to play some TTRPGs or board games with friends. I enjoy long walks and sketching in cafes or parks. I also play a couple of instruments and sing sometimes.
I think that’s all from me! Hopefully I didn’t ramble too much, now go rob some graves.
- Finn, 3D Character Artist