Principles Of Concept Design by Chris Doretz

Ever wanted to improve your concepts or broaden your knowledge of design? Then this masterclass in concept design by Chris Doretz is the perfect article for you! Chris covers a huge range of topics such as design principles, planning a concept, creating strong compositions and overpainting while also breaking down his fantastic blend of hard surface and organic art in his piece, SPECIMEN.

Intro

Hey, my name is Chris and I’m a Senior Concept Artist and Industrial Designer currently working at Cloud Imperium Games. I originally come from traditional design. I studied product design and worked for several years as a designer on exhibitions, for the automotive industry and industrial design client for consumer products. I have always been interested in exploring how things work and what makes a design stand out or in other words - what makes it ‘look good’. While working as a designer and depending on your field you focus more on production. This could be how a material works and feels, if it’s feasible to use a material for a specific part, if in general a design can be produced and what production method would work best. Of course all with the help of engineers and technicians. But you see, the process of designing takes a much bigger effort. And this is also why I got into the world of Game Art as an concept artist / concept designer. I like to be creative, I want to explore ideas and iterate on those on a much smaller time scale. You have a way bigger horizon to be creative and you are not bound to the laws of nature and physics. In other words, it is incredibly liberating to just rely on ‘sci-fi magic’ from time to time.

Design Principles

There’s actually a lot of different principles you can stick to. Combine some of them and you already have a nice list of ingredients for an optical pleasing composition.

For this piece the most prominent is utilizing balance. If you look at the overall composition you’ll see that all three cylinders are very much balancing themselves. You will find a similar look to all of them, of course with each cylinder having a slightly different content, but overall they are almost the same. All of this paired with symmetrical position their relation make clear that all of them are weighted more or less the same.

If you take a look at the scale of all cylinders, you will notice roughly a 30/70 ratio for all small and big shapes. For example the ratio of the glass in relation to the hard surface on the bottom or the container itself in relation to the content or the decals/labels relation to the white lower hard surface. Everything is broken down to this simple ratio and in most cases the 30/70 rule will work just fine. You can use this for everything else, like when you draw a wall panel, 70% of it should be relatively simple and plain while the remaining 30% can be more detailed. It doesn’t matter if it’s a sci-fi object or something straight out of nature. Of course you can further break it down: e.g. 70% big shapes, 25% medium shapes, 5% small shapes. In the end your ratio should feel natural. Self speaking, this also comes down to the prefered artstyle and most definitely will change accordingly. But then there are other principles that should take over and shift the focus to those principles.

Back at the Cylinders, having a closer look at each of them you also notice different principles. So not only is the whole composition using different principles, also every single part of the details (one cylinder) is making use of the principles. For example the left cylinder is utilizing similarity again. All three alien lifeforms are more or less using the same silhouette which makes them all fit and belong together as a unit.

The same could be said about the right cylinder - while the three rocks differ in size, their colour and overall silhouettes are very similar. They now, visually, form one unit, they belong together.

Another very important part is contrast. Not only speaking of colour and brightness but also the shape itself. All three contents of all of the cylinders vary greatly from each other and the cylinders itself. The containers are very sterile. Straight edges, plain colour, not a lot of variation. While the contents on the other hand are lifeforms, very spindly and weird looking legs, flower-like objects with a very saturated orange colour and tendrils leaving the main flower. And finally a a rock, a bit of uneven surface and no straight edges at all and again, a bit of grey, green, brown colours to stand out against the uniform black/white cylinders.

You see with all of those principles you can already form a very pleasing design, concept or environment that, in most cases, should be successful on its own without adding anything else.

Tips To Improve Understanding Of Design

From my experience, the biggest factor to improve is to build up your visual library. That means, look at art, see how other artists tackle a problem and find solutions. See how someone defines an artstyle and what the uniqueness of it means for the work that has been done for this project.

You can try to find to a solution by yourself every single hour of your day but if you don’t understand the fundamentals, then there’s a good chance the project will always look a little bit off. A very good example is this:

Grab a piece of paper and draw a motorbike from imagination. Most people pass motorbikes every day on their way to school, uni or work and maybe some of you ride motorbikes themselves. But if you don’t, there’s a good chance that you don’t remember or can’t imagine how they look or work. Where’s the suspension, the motorblock, how big are the wheels in comparison to the bike and how about all the other smaller technical parts? The same goes for everything else, look at your biceps, do you know how and where the tendons begin/end and what that means for your skin when you look at it, do you know how rust really looks like and what the ingredient is that makes rust look like rust ? You only will know if you look at things. And that’s where the understanding of design is pretty similar, explore art and design, build up your visual library to improve your understanding. As an character artist you study anatomy, coming from industrial design on the other hand I look at products, objects and also architecture.

For me a very good resource is to look at the IF Designs. Thousands of nominated designs are listed here, sorted in a very big catalogue so you can just search for whatever you need.

Another very good resource, less grounded in real products, is the blog Rhubarbes. More like a collection of a variety of sci-fi and cyberpunk-ish works. It’s a bit random but when you’re just gathering wild ideas this can help you when you work on modern or futuristic projects.

And for everything else, of course, Artstation, Art books and documentaries. Every morning basically starts with a few minutes of browsing Artstation to look at new stuff what other people are working on. I personally also like to collect artbooks so having physical books always at hand is super important to me. Same goes for documentaries - just pick a topic that sparks your interest and fire away. I personally love BBC earth or National Geographic.

Specimen - Lighting Breakdown

Working with props, or specifically things that are not much reliant on sunlight, shadows and volumetrics, in most cases can be lit relatively easy with a regular 3 point light rig.

You have your key light - giving your object the most illumination. Only having a key light will give very hard and dark shadows so you should then also add a fill light. A fill light will brighten the hard shadows a bit, so that you also illuminate your object slightly from a different angle. Then you have your rim lights, illuminating your object from behind, giving it a nice silhouette and brightening it a bit from the back.

This setup works for a majority of plain compositions with emphasis of single objects instead of a whole scenery - which would be a more or less different approach. Of course you can play around with those lights, add some more, reduce some or change some of the light intensities but it should give you a very quick and ‘fitting’ setup to start with.

Now for my final setup it looks a bit different.

While all tubes already come with a very harsh and intense lighting ring inside the tubes itself (a ring on top of the tubes and a ring on the bottom of the tubes) illuminating the objecs inside (1), I did not need many lights to illuminate the rest of the scene.

There’s one small and soft key light coming right from the front and above behind the camera, just enough to make the plastic bottom of the tubes visible and give a little bit of illumination to the objects inside the container (2). But the main focus for this light is to show the non-glassy parts of the cylinders.

Now I brought in a big overhead lamp. It will give even further illumination to the objects inside. Now also some of the roughness and texture on the objects inside the tubes will become alive. Especially on the rock - there’s now also reflections, nice and bright parts and even the plastic bottom of the tubes will get more illumination just because the overhead light is so relatively big (3).

But we are still missing some beautiful reflections and highlights on the more shinier parts of the reflective materials. So now the two rim lights will come in behind the cylinders. You instantly see that now the plastic bottom will light up on the outer edges - a very pleasant and defining reflection that will guide your eye and show you where material bends or changes forms. Depending on your light visibility, the glass now will also have something to reflect, in my case it will just simply reflect the area lights.Those lamps will give the glass a more believable state that those tubes are actually sitting in a laboratory environment, for example.

Those rim lights and all the nice highlights on top of the rock, plant and the three bugs will make it pop out even more (4).

And for the rest, don’t forget an environment that will actually reflect all the nice lighting. Most visible on the bottom of the tubes, you now can see how the reflections will light up the bottom and instantly you notice how the lights react to the surfaces. Very subtle, but still noticeable, the environment will illuminate the tubes and objects a bit more with reflections, making it even more believable, especially because now the glass and the droplets can reflect parts of the floor (5).

If you don’t have an environment, for example when you rendering “floating” objects, more rim lights below the object will do the trick just fine instead of having a floor.

And, of course, there’s also the option to use a nice HDRI that will instantly give you a very natural feel. The only problem here is that you somehow need to play by the HDRI’s rules. In a lot of cases, and depending on your weapon of choice renderer, changing an HDRI is sometimes a bit of work if you already have a specific end-frame in mind. But still in any way HDRI’s will save you a tremendous amount of time.

An absolutely incredible source for HDRI’s is Poly Haven.

Did you plan the lighting around the models or the other way round?

For this specific piece the lighting kind of evolved alongside the modelling. From the beginning I knew lighting would be crucial because of the glass cylinders and because I wanted to just let the three cylinders stand on their own without any environment at all. But all in all my concept did not rely on mood that much. So there is nothing else that can grab attention, it’s just the cylinders with eventually a neutral floor. In a lot of cases other approaches are better. For example if your concept or environment is aiming to convey a specific mood, you may want to think earlier about lighting, maybe even right from the beginning. You don’t need much light illuminating and showing off a weapon or prop but a moody scene without proper light will not work at all.

An earlier alternate version where the environment is actually bright and there is more lighting coming from a big ring on the top. But it did not turn out that well so I scrapped the idea for a darker / nonexistent environment just to give it a much more readable contrast.

Creating Flowers/Plants

The flower like object in the middle is actually two 3D scans of a succulent that have been scaled and squished into each other to make it look like some kind of alien plant. For this one I used the amazing scans from Ian Hubert’s Patreon. A big shoutout, if you want to learn Blender, head over to his patreon and give him some love. There’s so much knowledge Ian has to give out.

Back to the plant and objects, especially for concepting scenes and environments, try to go the easy way. There’s no need to invent the wheel over and over again. For some of my works and scenes, I recycle a small amount of props, assets, materials or scenes I have done already in the past. Once they’re done, you can reuse as much as possible without it being too obvious that you reused your assets. 3D scans, assets from the unreal marketplace and other sources are a good way to save time. Same goes for kitbashing or photobashing - use as many already established assets you have at hand to make your life easier.

In my scene for example, the small three spiders are actually humans but their bones and rigs are also actually moved and scaled around to mimic a spider like alien. And the boulder on the right is not just a boulder - it’s a rock ;)

Composition

The composition for this scene is pretty straight forward. In general the perspective for the composition is just straight on from the front. In most cases you want a more dynamic composition but since I wanted to give all three cylinders the same exposure - just a straight frontal perspective was the best choice. But when you look at the rule of thirds overlay, you see it’s not quite hitting the lines and is actually moved a bit to the right. Usually this would be an annoying eye-sore but I really like to give my concepts some kind of UI overlay afterwards. For me it’s part of the presentation, either filling a concept with exploratory decals or signage. It’s always a great way to describe your concept even more without saying or writing anything at all. But be careful, it doesn’t work on everything.

So having an UI overlay slightly on the left with the cylinders moving ever so slightly to the right side the mismatch would then automatically be corrected. Now having three similar cylinders with different contents, slightly offset with a nice UI overlay. That felt like a nice composition that would work for me.

Those are some of the decals and UI I made. As mentioned, I really like to think about those small details, even if they are not much visible later on in the finished concept. It’s the small things that make your project stand out. And for me it’s decals: labels, signs, lettering scattered around on the concept itself or as, in my case, an overlay.

Common Composition Mistakes

A common mistake I see really often is when people want to show everything and be too perfect. In a lot of cases you don’t have to show every single detail of your work. A good composition means it will carry every aspect of your work without overloading your eyes. There should be a good balance between showing big, medium and small details, lighting and mood. This not only counts for environmental works but also props or single objects. You don’t need to explain fully how something is assembled. If the design itself shows everything it needs, there’s no need to take the extra step and create more work that’s not necessary. Especially on environmental projects you should focus on the points of interest.

For example one of an exercise I did a while ago. From the beginning I knew that I would not need good materials, my geo could be super rough because I wanted to focus on mood and composition. As you see all the textures are incredibly rough and the geo is also just super rudimentary. Important was the lighting and the mood I wanted to convey. So I focused on those - looking at the overpaint and just hinting at the buildings. Your brain does not need a lot of information, it will add them automatically and correct small mistakes and fill in the blanks. Especially for moodier pieces you can be a bit more loose.

Do not fall into the trap of making everything too perfect because this will tie you into an infinite loop of correcting mistakes and iterating on details.
There are actually quite a few mistakes in this environment I did. For example the shadows fall into the wrong direction while the light is coming from a different one. The mountain in the background would eventually cast a much bigger shadow to the right side or even cover the sun partially, the textures don’t align at all and some of them don’t quite fit. But it works for what it is. And if I can invest time into exploring some other concepts instead of correcting those shortcuts then that’s a very viable option.
A good rule of thumb is if you or someone else only notice a mistake after a second or third look, then it’s probably not worth investing more time to correct. Of course, there are some technicalities you probably need to follow depending on what you are doing, for example as someone working on in-game meshes where you only have so much freedom. But if you do have some space to experiment, especially doing concepts - take it.

And again, don’t try to be too perfect and too harsh on yourself. All of us already have enough on our plate so think twice if you really need to model those 10 TX security screws on a railing on the backside of your oil rig composition that you only see from afar ;)

Fogged Glass

Creating the fogged glass was actually rather easy. My main software is Blender so for the materialI used a regular principled BSDF shader with the transmission turned up and adjusted IOR of 1.490 to give it a refraction of acrylic glass. The IOR (index of refraction) will tell your shader how the light will refract when it hits it. In almost 95% of the cases you only need some for water, glass or acrylic. It can get very complicated if you want to research it. A good source to look IOR’s up is this site. Save it and if you need it, just have a quick search for your IOR.

Then the only thing I did to the glass is that I gave all the cylinders a roughness map. You can find great textures for that on textures.com or just simply draw one yourself. Depending on each cylinder and how you treated the roughness map, the shader will create a very pleasant fogged glass. Especially the first one which appears fogged up with more transparent droplets running down the glass. After that I’ve given the roughness map a smooth transition with the top of the cylinder slightly darker than the bottom making it appear more foggier on the bottom then the top. So now the cylinder appears to be foggier on the bottom where on the top there is moisture forming and then dripping down on the glass. And that is pretty much it, you don’t have to mess around with volumetrics or creating a correct fog, it’s all done with one roughness map.

Same goes for the other two cylinders, the middle one is more or less an inverted version of the first where the water droplets now actually have more roughness than the rest making it appear there’s only a small bit of fog inside the glass with water droplets running down the glass. That's because now the ‘rougher’ water droplets will reflect more of their surrounding environment making it look like water . Now add a bit of smudges and then the second cylinder is also done. It’s a quick and cheaty way of implementing water on glass surfaces or making it at least appear as such very quickly. Of course you can go ahead and even give it a normal map or a displacement map and refine it more.

Last but not least, the cylinder on the right - it does not have a specific roughness map. I knew I would paint it over afterwards with some smudges so I just skipped adding a roughness texture to the glass and just let him be transparent. You could now go in and also add smudges, fingerprints or small dust particles to the maps.

Overpainting

Overpainting in this kind of sense is pretty much refining the finished render or concept in photoshop or any other software of your liking. In a lot of cases overpainting for concept can mean either painting over a very basic 3D model or layout of a level, painting over a blockout or prototype. Giving it more refinement, adding details and decals or changing parts of the concept image and eventually finalising with some corrections of the lighting, colour and overall look and feel. There’s no boundaries, you can use whatever you need to overpaint an image. May it be with using photos for photobashing or just plain brushes. It also can mean just using the bare minimum or changing an image entirely.

Overpainting Process and Tips

This piece was relatively simple and I have not overpainted or corrected much since the model and render was already on a level which did not need much correction. If you compare both, the things that I changed is correcting the colour and values, improving the contrast a bit with bringing up the whites and highlights and bringing down the blacks. All of the very last colour correction steps I always do in the Camera Raw Filter in Photoshop. It gives you a lot of settings and possible changes, all on a smart layer so that you can go in and change it afterwards.

Furthermore I just pushed the clarity which will give the image just a tiny bit of more sharpness because it’s pushing the blacks and whites with contrast even more. Same goes for the colour, there is not much overall colour so just improving the vibrance a small bit will, especially the flower in the middle, pop more.

You can also go ahead and use the sharpening details to improve the edges a bit, giving the whole image a more crisper look. But you need to be careful not to overdo it. This also goes for all of the sliders, you very easily fall into the trap of becoming too fixated and just push the details, colours, sharpening or contrast too much where you lose your relation. Always compare your changes to the original before and after.

As a last step you can always go ahead and add a grain and lens correction (chromatic aberration where depending on your setting will shift colours slightly in their opposite direction) to imitate a real-life camera. But also be very careful, those can quickly evolve into a very very grainy image that has too much aberration so that it almost looks like you were looking through 3D glasses. Those effects can enhance your image but also destroy it. In most cases - less is more.

Some other examples of mine, both on top is the raw rendering directly out of Blender and the bottom is the adjusted version. Especially on the spillway concept on the left you can see there’s a bit more photobashing and painting involved while the underpass on the right is more relying on pure colour correction.

Where are you looking to grow as an artist?

I am always looking everywhere for new things to learn, tricks that can help me elsewhere or topics that will let me stay ahead of the curb. My comfort zone is environments, props and in general science fiction. I really like working with high tech and futuristic projects but from time to time I need to look elsewhere. For example all of my latest stuff has been mostly sci-fi environments but this year I looked for the first time at character modelling. I just had the idea to learn something new - in other words sculpting a character, properly texturizing, baking and rigging him, also in combination with armor and weapons. Something that I have not done before, at least not to this extent.

So I started the Lord of the Rings Uruk Hai Berserk project, looked at getting properly into Blender character sculpting. Had my first contact with Marvelous Designer and Substance Painter. Overall I really enjoy looking at the things I can learn on the way. You should always aim to learn something new to not get stuck in a specific routine and over time you may find workflows for you that work better or faster as the ones you are bound to at the moment.

Inspiration

I find inspiration in everyday things. If I see something interesting or cool, I keep it in my ever growing folder of projects I want to tackle some time. This can be everything, just some nice photos, some other concept artists work, stories or ideas, screenshots of games and movies - pretty much everything that inspires me. If I now have a look at the folder I already see tons of stuff I want to tackle right now because those are things that inspire me to do something.

And also, a very big potion is looking at artists and especially friends and which personal projects they are working on. In most cases you hear their personal story about their project. If you hear someone else talking about something with enthusiasm and excitement - it will almost guaranteed excite myself and spark that makes me want to work on something similar or at least learn about the topic.

A collection of inspiring images I saved that will remind me of starting a new project. They are more like a reminder that will start something new. A loose collection like this is good when you see something you want to see evolving into a new project, next to your regular inspirational or reference folder. But you can also very quickly get overburdened with ideas so try to keep it relatively small.

Feedback

Feedback is incredibly important, not only for getting feedback to notice mistakes but to learn to see things with someone else's eye. All of us will at some point fall into the trap of looking at something with blinds on. You will be too much focused on your own work and your own means of working that you ignore other opinions or other options. It’s easy to overlook something, just waving and running with it. But that’s totally normal. The magic is getting back to a habit of looking at your artwork objectively, judging it and criticise where possible - at best by other people.

Just hit up a friend, a family member, they do not even need to be in the industry - it’s about opinions you want to gather. When you specifically need in-depth knowledge, just reach out to an artist you feel like they can give you a nudge in the right direction and help you out with some advice. If it’s more technical, then you can always join some of the countless discord servers to ask and gather feedback. For example the Ian Huberts Discord, Vaughan Lings Discord, CG Core or of course experience points. If all of that fails and you’re still stuck, feel free to shoot me a message.

Advice

Just one advice: absolutely never ever stop doing art just because you don’t like a piece you finished or someone else does not like it. With every piece you do, you will get better, it’s inevitable. If you are doing art for yourself just because it brings you joy, then don’t let that joy being taken away from you. We all are here to learn so take in what you can, learn as much as you are able to and do some kickass art!

Future Work

If only I knew myself but I’ll keep you updated ;)

Outro

Thank you all very much for reading! If I managed to inspire at least one of you by my ramblings, if I was able to help out someone stuck or answer a question with all of the above then my mission is already completed.

Feel free to give my Artstation a visit. Hope all of you stay healthy in these weird times, wherever you may be right now.

Chris