3da26 scott robertson

This monster may not have high-tech hubless wheels, but it more than makes up for it with a significant barrier-bashing bumper design of its own © Scott Robertson, Annis Naeem

Interview l Scott Robertson Faster, better, stronger l Interview

Artist Scott RobertsonWebsite www.drawthrough.com

Blog www.drawthrough.blogspot.comCompany www.designstudiopress.com

Location USAExpertise Concept design

Software modo, Photoshop, SketchUp, Alchemy

Client list BMW subsidiary DesignworksUSA, Bell Sports, Giro, Raleigh, Mattel, Spin Master Toys, Patagonia, Minority Report feature film, Nike, RockShox, OVO, Rockstar Games, Sony

Online Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment America, Buena Vista Games,

THQ and Fiat to name just a few

Born into the art scene in California, Scott Robertson was destined to become an incredible designer. Lynette Clee discovers how 3D software has helped step his vehicle concepts up a gear

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D esigner of over 20 years, president of Design Studio Press and director of Entertainment Design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, Scott Robertson has a

fascinating career story which starts with the influence of his late father. As a painter and student of the Art Center in the early Sixties, Scott’s father clearly encouraged his son in the right direction. Through his knowledge of design and drawing he was able to offer Scott the huge boost he needed, as well as an insight into the jobs that exist for creative people with the right design and visual communication skills. Though his father’s path was one in illustration, Scott’s passion for transportation design steered him in another direction at the Art Center in 1987, but the reality of designing production cars didn’t quite provide the challenge he’d hoped for in the end, as Scott explains, “After graduation I found that the idea of designing production cars seemed to be a bit too slow for me. So I sought out the design of consumer products that needed a lot of the styling influences I enjoyed developing for cars during school.” Opening a design consultancy with Neville Page the day after graduation, Scott’s 20-plus year career took off, with clients going on to include Fiat, Rockstar Games and Sony Online Entertainment, as well as contributions to feature films such as Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. This showcase takes a look at some of Scott’s latest personal work while giving an insight into his impressive creative workflow.

InspIreD publIshIngSpeciality publisher Design Studio Press was born in 2001 as a direct response to Scott’s father’s death. “It was at his funeral when I saw how many of his fellow artist friends showed up that I took stock of

“I want to be like Scott Robertson,” Daniel says. “He’s always trying something fresh and being so successful at it. His previous book Alien Race taught us how to use a MacBook camera to create myriad new shapes and characters in minutes. Now, Scott shows us with DRIVE how versatile the fuel-injected side of his brain is. DRIVE’s broad vehicle fleet includes trashy salvage racecars, sleek futuristic moon rovers, experimentally shaped beauty-coupes and much more. To step up his game, Scott entered the ever-growing 3D community within only two years and fearlessly rocks modo. The results of this playful software usage are amazing. And, like with many of his books, Scott offers centre stage to young Art Center College of Design students to showcase their talents – in DRIVE it’s Annis Naeem and Daniel Gardner – and you can clearly recognise them all on the very cool book cover. So, all of us gearheads have a bad day without ideas once in a while, and that’s the day you wish you had a copy of DRIVE to spark a thought. Scott, thank you for this book!” See more of Daniel’s work at www.cosmic-motors.com.

DrIVeDaniel Simon, vehicle designer for TRON: Legacy and author of Cosmic Motors tells 3D Artist why Scott Robertson’s DRIVE is well worth the investment

Scott explains, “Most artists can build a body

of work and put together a book of their work,

spend some money getting it printed, but

what happens after those palettes of books

land in your garage and your family and

friends have each bought a copy? This is

where I feel the hard part of being a small

publishing company hits me the most. We

have actually done very well so far in that

now we have 35 titles printed and none have

lost money. On the flipside it is doubtful that

any of our books will be major-selling

successes as our subject matter is very

specific and bookstore buyers have had a

hard time classifying where our books fit on

their shelves. We publish a lot of visual-

development books without a movie tie-in.

Some even feature the work of students!

They’re not graphic novels, they’re not ‘art of’

books and they feature mostly digital art so

none of the art buyers seem that interested

either. However, we have always received a

lot of positive feedback about the quality of

books from our fans once they find them.”

Life in pubLishing


A The scale of the vehicle is accentuated by having to walk between the front and rear wheels to get in © Scott Robertson, Annis Naeem

B Having made a usable 3D model of the ‘Power Slide’ in modo, why not duplicate it and go racing? © Scott Robertson, Daniel Gardner

C After moving the sketch into Photoshop, wheel arches were dropped over the tops of the tyres © Scott Robertson

Where to buy: www.designstudiopress.com

my own professional relationships since graduating from Art Center,” Scott says. “I found that I had become so busy with work that I had really lost touch with the great friends I had during school. I wanted to try and rekindle the fun of doing personal work that I used to experience with my friends during design school.” And that’s how Design Studio Press’ first title Concept Design came to be. Concept Design 2

followed in 2006 after a number of other successful releases, along with self-authored titles Lift Off and Start Your Engines in the same year featuring professional and personal sketches, concept designs and colour renderings of everything from airships to hovercrafts, and futuristic and retrospective car designs. DRIVE is Scott’s latest personal project featuring a new array of fast cars, off-roaders, motorcycles and monster vehicles from a whole range of genres. And he’s not stopping there.

“Regarding my next personal books I have three projects in the works,” Scott reveals. “One is a collection of spaceship sketches and renderings done with Annis Naeem and Danny Gardner who helped me wrap up the content for DRIVE. Another is a collaboration with John Park, Daniel Park and Ben Mauro, which will feature sketches and renderings of a wide variety of robots. The book I would most like to focus on, though, is my long-put-off and overdue educational book sharing the drawing, rendering and design techniques which I have taught over the last 16 years.”

The challenge of InVenTIonKeeping vehicle designs continuously fresh and stimulating isn’t always easy. “One way I try to keep my design fresh is to look at work online so as not to create something I’ve seen before,” Scott says. “By knowing what has been done before I can

A lack of fundamental design knowledge, I believe, is the core weakness of most 3D work online

These wheels are of the new ‘B-class hubless’ style, recently declassified by the military and now finding the way to many of the privateer racing teams around the world © Scott Robertson

After a few hours of modelling and rendering in modo, Annis Naeem painted over this open-wheel sci-fi racer, nudging it visually even further beyond our own time and space © Scott Robertson, Annis Naeem

BC

A


Scott says, “The software will never save a bad idea. Another very noticeable thing in viewing a lot of the 2D work people post online is that there is a very strong lack of drawing ability being presented. On the 3D side I see a lot of beautiful models and nice renderings, but I rarely see stunning designs or compelling scenarios being shown. A lack of fundamental design knowledge, I believe, is the core weakness of most 3D work online.”

Strengthen your deSignS


off, which is the goal,” Scott continues. “The real challenge is in the range of styles you need to be able to achieve – much like designing for any entertainment experience, the content/design is driven by the narrative. Since you, as the concept designer, do not control this narrative and everything you design should help to enrich the experience, you need to have great range if you want to work on more than only one part of a game. When you design vehicles for a real-world brand you must pay attention to the heritage and all of your efforts go to the refinement of the brand aesthetic into the future. In designing content for a game, often you are challenged to create rivalling aesthetics so players can associate with different-looking factions. It is this exercise of designing the opposites that I find both challenging and rewarding to pursue.”

[avoid] repeating our past while I try to invent my next creation.” Always carrying a camera whenever he visits an industrial, military, aerospace or aircraft museum to shoot reference for future projects helps with creative inspiration too. And collaborations with other artists keep him energised – working with Annis Naeem and Daniel Gardner on DRIVE, their fabulous work attitude and ethic were both motivating and inspiring. “Annis and Danny are two of my former students from Art Center and I find it fun to collaborate on projects with my students if they are doing an internship for me,” Scott adds. “I really like sharing my techniques with them and seeing the great work they create with the knowledge.”

With DRIVE, the approach was to concept vehicles for the videogame space. “Of course, designing for the game space is a lot of fun first


Master your foundation skills so you will have the communication tools you need to convey your designs to others

Value and colour are strong visual communicators in the design process. Scott always thinks of colour second after value, preferring to see the form of a design first. “Our brains perceive this through value change and not colour change, so I tend to set up all my lighting this way first,” Scott tells us. “After that I pick my colours based on the character or style of the

vehicle I am trying to create. In the case of the first chapter of DRIVE – Aerospace – the vehicle colours help to give you the feeling of the classic NASA rockets and spacecraft. White, black and gold metallised glass and a couple of blue or red accents help me to achieve the desired aesthetic for that chapter. The Military vehicles stay matte finish for the most part and are low in saturation compared to, say, the Pro Sports vehicles which are much brighter and louder, saying, “Look at me, I’m red, I must be fast!” Although the vehicles

designed in DRIVE have not yet been taken in game, Scott hopes a few interested parties in the movie business might trickle down into games one day.

D A hint of the vehicles’ massive scale can be derived from the size of the windows © Scott Robertson, Annis Naeem

E These sketches explore the design of an off-road, open-wheel vehicle, adding to the aerospace aesthetic with sci-fi tyres, exploration-style lights and an exposed engine © Scott Robertson

F After rendering the ExoPod, Annis dropped it into his sci-fi landscape to give us a sense of the vehicle in its otherworldly environment © Scott Robertson, Annis Naeem

Having been watching others share their work online Scott has picked up on a trend that suggests foundational understanding of design will often let good concepts down

Dirty WorkAll of the weathering of the vehicles is done after rendering in modo – none of it is done with texture maps or in the program itself

The dirt is added in Photoshop through compositing a ‘dirt’ rendering of the vehicle on top of the clean colour one, and erasing it to reveal the colours of the base rendering below

Another technique used is to add a Levels adjustment layer between the two colour layers and, by setting the levels to lighten the values of

the base rendering, scratches can be added through the paint to the bare metal

After scratching away the paint, the Levels adjustment mask is duplicated and switched to a Color adjustment layer, which gives colour control over the surface revealed under the paint

The graphics and details are added on the very top layer – many of which are then erased away as well

Poly modelling is so ‘rubbery’ compared to NURBS modelling, which is much more akin to the way I was formally trained

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© Scott Robertson, Daniel Gardner

I really love how easy it is to establish a

nice-looking rendering base out of modo

This beast was born through the introduction of a huge turbine engine running the length of the car –the driver was forced off to one side to make room for the engine! © Scott Robertson, Daniel Gardner

very complex surfaces and environments I would not

otherwise have created, and I seriously doubt I

would have invested the time it would have taken me

to draw,” Scott admits. “Also, it is so easy to play with

big shapes and the arrangement of wheels to

investigate very different proportions before moving

on to the surfacing. Sometimes vehicles start this

way and then I move to pen and paper after I have

made some nice discoveries in the 3D program.”

A self-taught modo artist, it took Scott about two

months of on-and-off play with the software to get

to the point where he could quickly set up a model

and get a usable render from version 301, which he

started out on. And that’s on top of watching

tutorials, reading the manual and asking friends

plenty of questions. “Now the program has become

faster and the renders much easier to set up,” Scott

adds. “On the modelling side it has taken me much

longer as I have yet to find enough free time to focus

on all of the modelling tools available, so I just rush

through and wing it. Poly modelling is so ‘rubbery’

compared to NURBS modelling, which is much more

akin to the way I was formally trained to build

traditional media models in clay, wood, foam, etc.”

Mixing it up, Scott will fluidly move between

traditional 2D and 3D digital media. “I try to just

pick the path of least resistance,” Scott comments.

“For instance, instead of sweating details on the

model or doing cut lines, I will jump into Photoshop

a paTh of leasT resIsTance

When it comes to design, Scott is motivated by a

desire to expand the ways in which he creates.

“Necessity is the mother of creation,” Scott says.

“Or, in this case, an adaptation of my pipeline to

communicate with others.” Coming from a

traditional drawing and rendering background, the

addition of modo into his pipeline was to overcome

the tiring process of creating orthographic drawings

and final colour renderings in matching front and

rear three-quarter views by hand, later rendering

them in Photoshop. Following several projects where

he was communicating a very large number of

vehicle designs to a group of modellers, this

integration of modo now enables Scott to speed up

workflow by blocking out his vehicle proportions in

3D after a few loose thumbnails to quickly establish

his design direction. “I first started this process in

SketchUp, but quickly gravitated to modo due to the

wonderful ease of use of the rendering side of the

program,” Scott adds. “Working this way now

enables me to provide a rough 3D model in place of

my orthos ensuring that the most important things –

the proportions, silhouette and stance – are

communicated as clearly as possible. I’m still not a

very clean or patient modeller. I can make up for this

by falling back on my traditional rendering skills

inside Photoshop. I really love how easy it is to

establish a nice-looking rendering base out of modo.

I add things like the cut lines in Photoshop and skip

them on the model.”The biggest influence of modo on Scott’s

workflow has been his experimentation with

replicators. “These items have helped me to create


and do those.” The open drawing project Alchemy

was also useful when it came to creating tunnels for

one project: “I might create a nice pattern in

Alchemy and then capture it as a custom brush in

Photoshop where I would paint a long Alpha map to

use in modo as a stencil mask on the material

shader of a cylinder, and I would then have an

instantly complex, sci-fi-looking 3D tunnel

structure having modelled only a bent cylinder.”

Although Scott works intuitively, there is one rule

that he always tries to follow: “If I could have

created the same result better or faster another

way then that is the way I should try and remember

to do it in the future,” Scott explains. “It takes

discipline to look back on a day’s work and say, ‘Oh

my, why didn’t I just use a pen and piece of paper

instead of sitting at my computer for ten hours? I

would have done the job so much better!’ Or, on the

flipside, ‘Why did I just paint this wheel for ten

hours? I could have built and rendered it in modo in

three and would have all four – not just one!’”

Looking ahead and extremely interested in the

use of 3D programs as rapid-visualisation tools,

Scott hopes to keep exploring the possibilities

within the pages of his future self-authored books.

When asked to sum up how he sees the impact of

3D software on concept design, Scott replies

simply, “Faster, better, stronger – just like the Six

Million Dollar Man!”

KIT-BASHING

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“Get to a good school or at least pick up some good books, magazines and DVDs on the subject,” Scott counsels. “Learn from the past. Master your foundation skills so you will have the communication tools you need to convey your designs to others; practise designing content for stories – not just drawing, modelling and rendering things you personally like. The job, at the end of the day, is to be able to provide endless design options for all of the things – environments, characters, vehicles and props – that are needed to support and enhance a narrative.”

Tips forbuddingarTisTs

Taking the traditional technique of ‘kit-bashing’, performed by media modellers for a long time now, Scott’s designs apply the digital equivalentKit-bashing was used extensively in the Salvage chapter of DRIVE. Scott explains, “The premise for this chapter was that the vehicles were created by a bunch of gearheads who had access to a huge junkyard of old engines and other vehicle parts. After establishing this scenario for the chapter I was faced with how could we quickly achieve this aesthetic in our renderings? The basic idea is that by using existing parts – digital or traditional – you can very quickly build something you would never have the resources to do from scratch. The resource I was short on was time. I did some digging on the internet and found a few sites that sell various 3D digital parts royalty free. I started a lot of the vehicles in the Salvage chapter this way by buying odd parts then digitally modifying and recombining bits and pieces. We’d do the same process with 2D photography – I’d go and shoot various mechanical parts in places like aircraft museums. Using our painting skills in Photoshop we were able to create high-detail renderings well beyond what we could have accomplished had we modelled every single part from scratch.”

Stand out from the crowd with design skills you’ll be proud of. Scott shares a few words of advice for budding concept designers

Danny Gardner did a great paintover on top of a 3D model rendering to create the Black Widow in all of its salvaged glory © Scott Robertson, Daniel Gardner

Here is a nice example of modo’s new tools being put to good use; lots of 3D model parts were kit-bashed into this beast © Scott Robertson, Daniel Gardner

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