Concept art is a subset of illustration.

What is illustration? Dictionary.com says this of the word “illustrate”:

1. to furnish (a book, magazine, etc.) with drawings, pictures, or other artwork intended for explanation, elucidation, or adornment
2. to make clear or intelligible, as by examples or analogies; exemplify
3. 3. Archaic. to enlighten
4. to clarify one's words, writings, etc., with examples: To prevent misunderstandings, let me illustrate.

So, an “illustration” is art that communicates something.

There is much of fine art that falls into the category of illustration. Any imagine that tells a story or represents an object is illustrative, whether it is communicating something as complex as a scene from the Lord of the Rings, or as simple a thing as “a horse” or “a man”.

What makes concept art different from illustration is that the audience isn’t the person who reads a book, plays a game, or watches a movie. The primary audience of concept art is other artists, and other people involved in the making of the final product. Concept art is the blueprint that is used to make more art. It is also used to communicate with the holder of the intellectual property rights involved in a project, and it can also be the leverage that is used to get funding for a project.

If you want a formal education that will prepare you for being a concept artist, then study illustration.



since local art scene has not been exposed to cg or digital arts as much as foreign countries do
we've thinking around trying to give out as much information as we can,hoping that this field can expand more in our local scene

here's an example of concept arts


of course,it's not as nice as others
but the main point of concept arts is about selling ideas

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Added on July 14, 2008, 2:13 amSIGGRAPH Asia
by westman — last modified 24 December 2007 08:04 AM

Background

Asia is rising. While Japan has been dominant economically for decades, China and India are growing at a phenomenal rate, and the four Asian tigers, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan are still strongly on the prowl. Asian governments are pumping billions of dollars into digital media technology research and development, and Asian contributions in this field have increased tremendously. SIGGRAPH conference figures show that while the number of papers from Asia has more than doubled in the new millennium, Asian attendance at the conference has fallen by about a third, due partly to cost and visa problems.

These form the background to a meeting between Scott Owen and Alyn Rockwood, the President and Vice President of ACM SIGGRAPH, and a group of Asian delegates during SIGGRAPH 2006 in Boston. The meeting explored the possibility of having some form of the SIGGRAPH conference in Asia, which would also include Australia and New Zealand. It was a meeting of minds, and the idea was put on the ACM SIGGRAPH agenda.

Scott subsequently appointed a steering committee, chaired by Alyn. The members were Scott himself and 11 representatives from Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. The committee, together with their Malaysian host, met in Kuala Lumpur in early December 2006 to study the feasibility of such a conference.

The meeting strongly supported the idea of a SIGGRAPH conference in Asia, and Tokyo and Singapore were invited to bid for the hosting of the inaugural conference, to be held in December 2008 or 2009, depending on the readiness of the host. Each bid had to be coupled with a nomination for a Conference Chair who is familiar with the venue both geographically and in terms of its bureaucracy. December was chosen to keep a distance from the annual SIGGRAPH conference in August and to avoid the major Asian Lunar New Year holiday period in January and February.

YT Lee, the Vice Chair of the Singapore Chapter, and Masa Inakage, a founding member of the Tokyo Chapter, presented their bids at the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee meeting in Seattle in February 2007. The EC awarded the hosting of the first event to Singapore, based on the strength of its bid. YT Lee was also confirmed as the Conference Chair. John Finnegan, the Chair of SIGGRAPH 2006, was appointed as the Associate Chair to lend his experience and expertise in running large events.

At the end of June, a team of five ACM SIGGRAPH representatives visited Singapore to inspect the conference venue and investigate Singapore’s readiness to hold the event in 2008. Their recommendation to the Executive Committee that Singapore was indeed ready to host the first event in December 2008 was accepted. It was also decided that the event would be called SIGGRAPH Asia.

Since then, the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee has also confirmed that SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 will be held in the Japanese city of Yokohama and that the Conference Chair will be Masa Inakage.



This post has been edited by yukikaze: Jul 14 2008, 04:25 PM

concept art is not a form of advertising
but more to a form of illustration of an idea
concept art is not for end user but rather the producer
mostly in the industry or game,film and animation industry

Mattes are used in photography and special effects filmmaking to combine two or more image elements into a single, final image. Usually, mattes are used to combine a foreground image (such as actors on a set, or a spaceship) with a background image (a scenic vista, a field of stars and planets). In this case, the matte is the background painting. In film and stage, mattes can be physically huge sections of painted canvas, portraying large scenic expanses of landscapes.

In film, the principle of a matte requires masking certain areas of the film emulsion to selectively control which areas are exposed. However, many complex special-effects scenes have included dozens of discrete image elements, requiring very complex use of mattes, and layering mattes on top of one another.

For an example of a simple matte, we may wish to depict a group of actors in front of a store, with a massive city and sky visible above the store's roof. We would have two images—the actors on the set, and the image of the city—to combine onto a third. This would require two masks/mattes. One would mask everything above the store's roof, and the other would mask everything below it. By using these masks/mattes when copying these images onto the third, we can combine the images without creating ghostly double-exposures. In film, this is an example of a static matte, where the shape of the mask does not change from frame to frame.

Other shots may require mattes that change, to mask the shapes of moving objects, such as human beings or spaceships. These are known as travelling mattes. Travelling mattes enable greater freedom of composition and movement, but they are also more difficult to accomplish. Bluescreen techniques, originally invented by Petro Vlahos, are probably the best-known techniques for creating travelling mattes, although rotoscoping and multiple motion control passes have also been used in the past.

It's a very old technique, going back to the Lumière brothers. A good early American example is seen in The Great Train Robbery (1903) where it is used to place a train outside a window in a ticket office, and later a moving background outside a baggage car on a train 'set'.

sauce:wikipedia

here's also another category of CG
matte painting

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Added on July 14, 2008, 2:46 amMattes and widescreen filming

Another use of mattes in filmmaking is to create a widescreen effect. In this process, the top and bottom of a standard frame are matted out, or masked, with black bars, i.e. the film print has a thick frame line. Then the frame within the full frame is enlarged to fill a screen when projected in a theater.

Thus, in "masked widescreen" an image with an aspect ratio of 1.85:1 is created by using a standard, 1.37:1 frame and matting out the top and bottom. If the image is matted during the filming process it is called a "hard matte." In contrast, if the full frame is filled during filming and the projectionist is relied upon to matte out the top and bottom in the theater, it is referred to as a "soft matte."

In video, a similar effect is often used to present widescreen films on a conventional, 1.33:1 television screen. In this case, the process is called letterboxing. However, in letterboxing, the top and bottom of the actual image are not matted out. The picture is "pushed" farther back on screen and thus made "smaller", so to speak, so that, in a widescreen film, the viewer can see, on the left and right of the picture, what would normally be omitted if the film were shown fullscreen on television, achieving a sort of "widescreen" effect on a square TV screen. In letterboxing, the top of the image is slightly lower than usual, the bottom is higher, and the unused portion of the screen is covered by black bars. For video transfers, transferring a "soft matte" film to a home video format with the full frame exposed, thus removing the mattes at the top and bottom, is referred to as an "open matte transfer." In contrast, transferring a "soft matte" film to a home video format with the theatrical mattes intact is referred to as a "closed matte transfer."

This post has been edited by yukikaze: Jul 14 2008, 02:46 AM

Prof. Don Greenberg announced as First Featured Speaker for Singapore SIGGRAPH conference in December.
Friday, 11 July 2008


Advertisement
SIGGRAPH Asia is pleased to announce its first featured speaker, Prof. Don Greenberg.

Prof. Greenberg has been researching and teaching in the field of computer graphics since 1966. During the past 30 years, he has primarily focused on advancing the state of the art in CG and applying these in a variety of disciplines. He has taught courses in CG in computer science, computer-aided design in architecture, computer animation in art, and technology strategy for business.

His current computer science research projects involve realistic image generation, parallel-processing algorithms for rendering, new GUIs, and computer animation. His current application projects include ornithology and the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker, medical imaging and virtual surgery, architectural design for a green environment, and new types of computer displays, from electronic paper to touch-sensitive table displays.

Speaking on the topic of "The Expanding Boundaries of Computer Graphics", Prof. Greenberg will challenge the new generation of CG artists - those who will take great professional risks to solve big problems - to dream impossible dreams and extend the influence of computer graphics to many other disciplines.

Prof. Greenberg has also been accorded several awards in the course of his work; some of which include: the ACM SIGGRAPH Steven A. Coons Award for Outstanding Creative Contributions to Computer Graphics in 1987 and the NCGA Academic Award (the highest educational award given by the National Computer Graphics Association) in 1989.

Prof. Greenberg is currently the Director for the Programme of Computer Graphics at Cornell University. Many of his graduate students have gone on to become leaders in the fields of computer graphics, computer animation, and computer-aided design for architecture.
Six former students have won Hollywood's Technical "Oscars", and five have won the prestigious SIGGRAPH Achievement Award.

The official Into The Pixel web site give us our first conceptual look at Half-Life 2: Episode Three with this moody painting of, we assume, protagonist Gordon Freeman facing down the Advisor seen in previous episodes. Obviously, fans of the game know that Gordon has a serious beef with the Advisor following the events of Episode Two, but this hardly seems like a fair fight. Don't bring a crowbar to a telekinesis fight, Gordo.

While unconfirmed — the art is listed under "Half Life EP3" — it may lead to more speculation that the final episode in the Half-Life 2 trilogy will make an appearance at E3 2008. That's been denied by Valve spokesfolk, but you know how they love to twist words.

Potentially good news for consoles owners of the Sony persuasion is that the official Into The Pixel listing tags the game as seeing release on the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. Bigger look after the jump.

1st thing 1st,how much do you know understand about concept arts?
no mean to offense you
but there's always majority of people misunderstood illustration with concept arts
and yes no doubt,it's all about practice
to begin,1st have to get a strong foundation such as figure sketching
still life drawing.

well said
the purpose of this thread is not to have fun but rather to educate and share info amongst others about the industry

welcome aboard mate
which college you're going to?
at the moment the industry is kind of slow in m'sia
maybe lack of exposure to the community
but we're doing something here to help out people all around to understand what's CG,concept art and etc that is relevant to this field


well,we pe-planned that this would be a community service
well to those who does not understand well bout this field
feel free to ask question
hopefully we might be able to help out to further understand this field

interview for guillermo del toro
for hellboy 2 the golden army

This post has been edited by yukikaze: Jul 22 2008, 01:50 AM

N. Evan Van Zelfden in Los Angeles warns, watch out World of Warcraft. In an interview at E3 this week, Electronic Arts chief executive John Riccitiello said that EA is working on the next version of Star Wars game Knights of the Old Republic, and it will most certainly have a massively multiplayer online component to it.

"We've got two of the most compelling MMOs in the industry in development," said Riccitiello. The first title, based on the Warhammer property, will launch soon. "And the one that people are dying for us to talk to them about -- in partnership with Lucas, coming out of BioWare, which is, I think, quite possibly the most anticipated game, full stop, for the industry at the point when we get closer to telling you about it."

Does Riccitiello mean the oft rumored Knights of the Old Republic Online? "Yes," he said.

Moving into MMOs is an essential component for any gaming company, and it's a big part of the reason Vivendi merged with Activision, for that company's World of Warcraft MMO.

Riccitiello told Portfolio.com that he was interested in owning World of Warcraft, and that he did discuss it, but it wasn't in the cards. "Because [Vivendi] couldn't afford control of EA, and I wasn't giving it up."

But EA is firmly on that path now, with a KOTOR MMO, which would sidestep the consoles owned by Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. "Increasingly, people are going to be talking about direct-to-customer in our business," said Riccitiello. "I think we'll be talking about it louder than most."

Today, two-thirds of the game industry is console systems and dedicated handhelds. "We expect in 2011 for it to be fifty-percent," Riccitiello said.

MMOs will also be useful as a way to expand into foreign territories.

"China's a growth market for us," he said. "We're launching some mid-session games on a micro-transaction model." In May of last year, the company announced an equity investment in a leading Chinese online game operator, The9, Ltd. "And there's a bunch more coming that we haven't announced. "

The company has stated that M&A is part of the strategy, and EA is looking for core game companies "only when they bring great [intellectual property] and great teams," he said. The company is also interested in businesses that "help us build our platform in the area of Asia, online, and direct-to-consumer."

"One is strategic and new, one is core and profitable -- and we're looking at both," explained Riccitiello.

Future games aside, Riccitiello is most proud of EA's revenues, its console-business growth, and what's currently on display to the army of reviewers and game journalists in Los Angeles this week.

"We added almost a billion dollars to the revenue last year," he notes. "This year, we've told the street that we're going to add a billion to a billion-three."

And console games are a market that's doing well. "It's grown 30 percent year-to-date," says Riccitiello. "All three of the consoles are way up. The PC business in terms of it's aggregate of subscriptions/micro-transactions is also way up. "

But at the end of the day, it's about the games themselves.

"I think, hands down, there's not a publisher or a platform that's got what we've got," he says. In his own life, he sees how EA's games are making an impact: "I've got twenty-two nephews and nieces. A couple years there, I couldn't buy everything I wanted for them at the holidays. I can do the entire holiday -- and capture my mother for the first time -- at the EA store. That's never been the case before."

YOU SUCK AT PHOTOSHOP
admit it everybody does
now here's a dose of tutorial of "you suck at photoshop"
which comes quite handy when you got really bored and at the same time trying to hone your photoshop skills
enjoy guys


You Suck At Photoshop

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Added on July 31, 2008, 11:04 amActivision cans Ghostbusters game

Activision Blizzard has submitted its latest release schedule with no mention of forthcoming title from Terminal Reality, Ghostbusters, 50: Cent: Blood on the Sand from Swordfish or Double Fine's Brutal Legend.

Additionally the company plans to "realign" staff at High Moon Studios and Radical Entertainment, while Massive Entertainment and Swordfish Studios are both under consideration for sale or closure.

The future is similarly bleak for Vivendi Games Mobile and Sierra Online, both of which have been designated as "non-strategic business units", with Activision publishing CEO Mike Griffith extolling an efficiency drive.

This post has been edited by yukikaze: Jul 31 2008, 11:04 AM

THE MAKING OF THE DARK KNIGHT IMAX

In Universal Pictures' third installation of The Mummy franchise, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, we get to experience an especially creepy mummy up close and personal. Actor Jet Li is represented in a multi-layered computer-animated performance as a warrior trapped inside a terra-cotta shell. In moments of rage, his terra-cotta face cracks and falls away, revealing a grotesque "under-mummy" that also resembles the actor and delivers dialogue. This warrior’s curse is that he’s doomed to be encased forever in that shell, so terra cotta repeatedly re-grows over his face. The hot clay glows and smokes as it painfully re-seals.

“We basically had two hero characters,” says Nordin Rahhali, CG supervisor at Digital Domain (DD) in Venice, Calif. “The under-mummy resembles a dessicated, burnt Jet Li, and the terra-cotta outer shell resembles Jet Li in a more stylized way. The idea that director Rob Cohen had was that it would be like a Russian nested doll.”

Digital Domain’s effects crew began by amassing reference photography of a terra-cotta statue on set. “This gave us lighting cues and textures,” Compositing Supervisor Lou Pecora says. “We also shot a clean pass of the set and then a pass with Jet Li in it. You notice that when an actor is in a scene, the movement of the camera is more believable.” The actor’s image was then rotoscoped from the plate with the company's software Nuke (now marketed by The Foundry). Then DD’s proprietary tool Track was used to track the camera movement in the plate. “It’s better to rotoscope an environment rather than use greenscreen,” Rahhali says. “You can’t beat the real lighting cues that make a CG character sit in a scene.”

The digital version of Jet Li was modeled and animated in Autodesk Maya and rendered in Pixar RenderMan. “We made a model look like Jet first, and then we started dessicating it,” says Rahhali. To create multiple layers of the dessicated under-mummy, Digital Texture Lead Stan Seo created highly detailed textures on a Z-Brush model. “Displacement maps were then taken from Z-Brush and put onto a lower resolution cage to add back all that detail in Renderman,” Rahhali says. CG Lighting Supervisor Hanzhi Tang took Seo’s textures and created the shading model. “He added all the specular hits, the ambient occlusion, and beautiful subsurface scattering on the thinner pieces of skin,” Rahhali says.

The facial animation of the under-mummy drives the look of the crumbling terra-cotta shell, but a significant amount of simulation had to be added. “After we ran through the animation process, the shot would go through an effects process,” says Rahhali. “We have a pipeline that brings all the character geometry into [Side Effects] Houdini. Once it was in Houdini, our effects lead, Brian Gazdik, worked on all the cracking and shattering. A simulation was created on the surface of the character’s face. It was an interesting technique because based upon the deforming geometry, the animation was driving the surface simulation. The director wanted to have something that would crack and re-seal but still reveal the subtleties of the animation happening underneath. So our effects people would take this deforming geometry—the animation coming from Maya—and calculate stress maps to determine how much of an area of the face was moving during a particular length of time. Through that, they would run the simulation so that we’d have areas that were fully intact. Only when they hit a certain threshold of stress or flex would it crack along a seam. It was a physically based simulation that had artistic user input on where events would happen. It was a mix of articulate hand animation and some meticulous procedural work. Procedural work only goes so far—there was a lot of hand tweaking.”

While the crumbling terra cotta required significant particle simulation, the re-sealing of the character’s face with molten terra cotta was another challenge. “We wanted to come up with something that was physically based that you could believe was super-heated terracotta,” says Rahhali. “It had to be based on something you could relate to, like a hot piece of clay that’s glowing. These effects—including fine, wispy smoke and embers coming off the face—were pretty much all Houdini effects and all hand done.” DD rendered effects with Houdini’s Mantra renderer, though the company used its proprietary voxel renderer Storm (a Houdini plug-in) to render the smoke effects.

“In resealing the face,” says Pecora, “the director specifically wanted to see imperfections burning off, which happens when you’re firing clay. He wanted to see embers come flying off the face help the audience understand the physics of what was going on. When the face reseals and you see the expression on the under-mummy’s face, that has to translate to the outer terra-cotta shell.”

“There were so many layers required to give us what we needed in compositing,” says Pecora. “They got combined through a customized Nuke macro that we affectionately called ‘Pimp my Mummy.’ It was put together by one of our look development compositors, Chia-Chi Hu. It combined all the layers and allowed us access to color sliders and color controls. We had one input node that all had the layers in it—that got fed into Pimp My Mummy, which split all those layers and assigned controls to each of them so we could dial the subsurface scattering separately, without having to dig through the layers. We spent a lot of time in compositing addressing a lot of the lighting issues by adjusting the different passes—all within the interface that Chia-Chi put together for this show.”

This allowed Digital Domain to finesse the final look as efficiently as possible. “There were times when we had our supervisors or the director sit with an artist and dial in the controls interactively. That kind of time saving was invaluable," says Pecora. "You can’t do that by just iterating and iterating. You can cover seven or 10 iterations with one interactive session. What used to be just the toy of the cappuccino-steeped ‘Flame elite’ is now in the hands of us humble compositors!”
Credit Roll:

Director: Rob Cohen
Visual Effects Supervisors: Joel Hynek, Matthew Butler
Computer Graphics Supervisors: Nordin Rahhali, David Hodgins
CG Modeling Supervisor: Francisco Cortina
Animation Supervisor: Kelvin Lee
CG Lighting Supervisor: Hanzhi Tang
Compositing Supervisor: Lou Pecora
CG Modeling Artists: Raul Dominguez, Wayne Kennedy, Daniel Moy
Lead Character Rigger: Richard Grandy
Character Riggers: Marc Wilhite, George Saavedra
CG Animator: Slavik Anishchenko
Lead Compositor: Ted Andre
Compositors: Heather Hoyland, Chia-Chi Hu, Richard Thompson (Technical Developer)
Lead CG Effects Artist: Mårten Larsson
CG Effects Artist: Brian Gazdik
CG Lighting Artists: Diana Sear, Åsa Svedberg
Lead 3D Integration Artist: Geoffrey Baumann
3D Integration Artist: Justin van der Lek
Digital Texture Paint Lead: Stan Seo
Digital Texture Painters: Joseph Lacap, Ting Lo

welcome aboard mate
it's nice to see you actually come into this thread and post
very much appreciated
be sure to drop by often and share as much news ,knowledge and stuff as possible

great work snake
nice colors

work done by photoshop?