Hi there! I’m Glen, one of the 3D monkeys here at Space Ape. Our art team has a culture of mutual growth through sharing artwork and knowledge, which we believe makes us more rounded artists. I’m well into my handpainted art, so I figured I’d record myself painting a small prop, to share my workflow and techniques with my fellow apes.
Growing, learning, sharing!
Hi There,
I’m Carl ( The older one ;) ) and I’m a VFX Artist here at Space Ape.
I used to work in VFX for Animated films like Space Jam and El Dorado, so it was nice recently to rediscovering my Old School hand drawn skills, creating multi-frame textures.
If you incorporate some of these animations along with other particle systems, you can create some rather interesting effects. Each of the examples above are using just 1 repeating particle, so where the texture is costly, the particle count offsets it nicely.
Hi! I’m Chris and I am the Marketing Artist here at Space Ape Games.
This piece comes from a recent TF:EW project I was tasked with. Marketing wanted an image of Soundwave’s cassette as an album. I took this an ran with it. I started by coming up with some hilarious Transformers related song puns, and then went nuts with the 80′s retro futurism vibe and the above images are the result of this.
Features renders of the bot, tape and cassette case modeled in Maya and everything finished in photoshop.
Hey! Carl here. This has been a little personal project of mine to create an off-world habitation. I wanted to visualize what a HAB could look like with more industrial cues. I tried to steer clear of nasa’s white paint and foil coverings and head towards a flavor of a corporate hut off world.
I used Quixel for a majority of the texturing and found it to be very fast and adaptive compared to traditional workflows. I have learnt a lot of new things from this project and I’m looking forward to starting my next one soon!
Cheers,
Carl.
Hi, It’s Andrew again, today I would like to share some of my older conceptual work, this is my chunky space marine. My process for 2D rendering or concepts, is in a way very similar to the process I use when texturing a 3D model. I start out with just solid colours, then curve layers for shadows and light, followed by some texture detail and finally some highlights.
Hey there, I’m Amrita! I am a UI/UX Designer here at Space Ape, and occasionally I am loaned out to the Graphics Design team. For my first post I thought I would put up some of the graphic work I’ve done with the branding over the last few months.
The first piece is an invitation to our recent studio party. I took inspiration from the new pinball machine that we bought at work and drew my own version in the style of our brand. I added a new hue of blue to compliment our Space Ape colours, tweaked the style to be more of a retro - arcade feel.
The crochet design is a banner for the news feeds around the festive season. For this image I drew Albert, the famous ape of Space Ape, in the style of a cosy knitted sweater.
The last poster was designed for advertising the IT Services in the studio. The 3D character is by Neil Parkinson which you may have seen in a previous post. For this design I drew some comedy hardware failures in space, with USB constellations as a nice IT touch!
Hello, I am Alex, I work as a graphic designer at SpaceApe on the Creative Services team. We work across all the games producing marketing materials, things to go out on social media and in game in the newsfeeds.
Here is an example of a typical bit of work that we do for Rival Kingdoms to prepare the art to go in the newsfeed and on social media when a new Ancient is released.
To start with I take the original digital painting by Martyn. These paintings are perfectly suited to work within the hierarchy of the UI, where they have to convey character and be easily read in a lineup with all the other ancients. However for use in the newsfeed and social media we want to liven them up a bit and exaggerate the lighting and effects in order to create excitement and catch the eye of people idly scrolling through their facebook feed.
So onto step 2, I exaggerate the existing highlights, add a background, various particle layers, glows and magic effects to make the image more dynamic. If all the Ancients had this treatment on their portraits you would get a headache just scrolling through the collection screen!
Finally, I add a layer and paint in some shadows to create a silhouette for use as a teaser image to generate mystery around the upcoming ancient.
Hi! I’m Adam and I’m a UI/UX Designer at Space Ape.
Although I spend much of my time concentrating on wireframing, prototyping and product-type stuff, my background is in graphic design.
At Space Ape, I have a reputation of insisting on simplicity and visual clarity, and that is reflected in my personal work.
The results are Pixel People, a visual challenge to distill a character’s essence into just a few pixels. I hope you enjoy!
You’ll find more on my rarely updated Tumblr, and you can follow me on Twitter or Medium, where I write for The Space Ape Experience Blog.
Hey Guys, I’m Carl Button a 3D artist at Space Ape and I’ve got some fantastic news to share. We recently announced our new title Transformers Earth Wars!
The art team are incredibly proud of what they have created with Earth Wars and can’t wait to see what players and Transformers fans think of the game.
Roll out!
Hello! My name is Sam and I’m primarily a 2D artist at Space Ape. “Boxing Day” was a game jam project I produced alongside fellow Ape designer Alex Taylor at the Great British Winter Game Jam 2014. The theme here was “British Winter”, we produced a co-op game where you and 3 other players work together to steer a cardboard box down a snowy hill.
I was responsible for all the in game art and produced a few story slides to set the scene at the start and end of the game. For more of my personal work follow @fargalex , cheers!
“Nobody ever goes in and nobody ever comes out!”
Over the last few years the Space Ape Games art team has been hard at work creating games for mobile such as Samurai Siege and Rival Kingdoms: Age of Ruin. Like Oompa Loompas hard at work behind the gates of Wonka’s factory, we’ve led a secretive life, rarely appearing in public. We have shared little of how we work together and the miraculous goings on here at the Space Ape Games factory.
As an Art Team of 23, we are made up of a diverse mixture of cultures, backgrounds and disciplines. Whilst we all collaborate every day with the ambition to make the best looking games on mobile, we represent a vast array of artistic influences, passions and creative opinions.
Our plan is to write a new blog post every week, giving people an insight into what it takes to make our games and the challenges we face. We hope you’ll enjoy getting an inside look into what we’re thinking about, what we’re talking about and the content we’re creating.
Please consider this blog to be your very own Golden Ticket. Come on in!
The Space Ape Games Art Team.
