Hey, ive been modelling for some time now, and done my fair share of actual games design like mechanics, narratives and balancing etc.

I've just started to hone my skills towards environment modelling / hard surface modelling (when i look at my work over the last 3 years, thats probably my strongest point bar scripting)

Problem is, i have no confidence in traditional art anymore, its been 3 years or more since my art a level and i havent touched a pen or pencil or brush since and in terms of designing an environment im having trouble thinking where to logically begin, where do the industry start the process? what should i consider from the get go?

Any help on this would be fantastic, ive already been directed to FZD school, and i have a few months until september to practice the basics =]

Hope you can help!

I was actually going to mention FZD, have you taken a look at Feng Zhu's tutorials?

There's some pretty good ones that you might be interested in, architectural, vehicle design, etc.

Take a look:

EPISODE 28 Vehicle Sketching part1 - YouTube

EPISODE 33 Mech Design part2 - YouTube

Good starting point is always studies of others work or life-studies of objects to hone your basic skills. Either that or just draw with extensive reference so that you can augment your work on the fly with shapes and details beyond your current level.

wow! this site is fun.
http://idrawgirls.com/tutorials/

Heres an overwhelming pile of Links from CA that i find useful http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=190982 especially the youtube links at the start of the post and the 9 Assignment threads

Originally Posted by Weazel

Hey, ive been modelling for some now, and my fair share of actual games design like mechanics, narratives and balancing etc.

I've just started to hone my skills in towards environment modelling / hard surface modelling (when i look at my work over the last 3 years, thats probably my strongest point bar scripting)

Problem is, i have no confidence in traditional art anymore, its been 3 years or more since my art a level and i havent touched a pen or pencil or brush since and in terms of designing an environment im having trouble thinking where to logically begin, where do the industry start the process? what should i consider from the get go?

Any help on this would be fantastic, ive already been directed to FZD school, and i have a few months until september to practice the basics =]

Hope you can help!

Its like Stephen Platt and few other traditional artists said, "If you want to start drawing, you can just go home and start drawing right now. There is no other way around it."

With basic sets of traditional art skills and practice, comes confidence and improvements.

I started drawing doodles and making crappy concepts on pieces of paper as a kid. Now when I took it seriously I picked few concepts to start working on and have been working on them for a while now. As I became comfy with pencils I chose my set of tools for the traditional arts for better practice. I started drawing the human anatomy by the book, started watching stuff like, David Finch DVDs for penciling, and Stephen Platt DVDs of thumbnails and penciling the final concept. And according to the people at PCU, I have imrpoved in traditional arts as well as 3d.

Though I still draw concepts, rip them out and draw them again. (Something that I have been trying to avoid.) But the point is, you need to start drawing traditional in order to gain confidence, doesnt matter what it is.

If its an environment find out what types of creatures will be living there and try and create a believable world they could survive on.

If its a creature find out what world they'll be in and what they may eat drink or fight to live and how they would adapt to that.

Fzd is great in the way he breaks the process down into stages! Makes the whole creation seem alot more doable! I'll probably start spending a fair few solid hours a day watching through more of those videos :-)

Thanks for the concept art forums link and the other tuts guys :-) the idea to imagine the world when creating concepts is also a given that some may forget too, to have no imagination would be silly, so thanks for that :-)

Drawing from reference seems a good way to go, especially for one of the zbrush mechanical modules that's coming up! I'll have a look at stephen platt and david finch as well. If I get around to starting something today I'll post my progress just encase anyone has some further advice.

Cheers all! Hope your all enjoying the summer :-)

Idrawgirls was awesome too thanks again!

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Like others have said, FZD is great. There are 50+ episodes to watch. FZ is very skilled and it's easy to get lost in his process, but if you really listen to what he has to say then there is a lot to learn. I do concepts for work and I still find his videos very instructive.

Yeah i like how much info he gets across during the vids, learnt a lot about industry pipeline from him, not just for concept art obviously!

Scott Robertson has some excellent resources and tutorials via Gnomon. I believe some are on youtube as well.

http://www.thecomicarchive.com/

Sorry I couldnt post this before but aside from the tutorials for pencilling, this is one of the resources that I use. They have stuff from penciling to inking and so on.

Hope this helps.

Every thing helps guys =D
your all thuper awethome!