[immi]

Don't have anything useful info to add, except good luck with the project Row!

[Jezebel]

I second Immi! Good for you!

[immi]

Nobody seconds me damnit!

[Bishop_Six]

Sumaleth: This sounds cool. I would certainly love to see something like this.

immi: lol

[gLitterbug]

Wish you much fun writing the book! I will buy it for sure.

Don�t have any tips for you, just a question.

You said you will make sort of a history listing of important artists and how they work. Will that include real tutorials on how they achieve their results and which techniques they use? Or will the book only give an rough overview of their workflow?

Would love to see how the different artists use different styles and what impact that has on the picture and the viewer.

[Frost]

Sounds great Suma. A few great names come to mind, but I'm sure you can find the people you need. Good luck dude.

[Jaymo]

This sounds very interesting!

Concerning the "pre-doom-era" i would mention "castle wolfenstein" which was the first real first-person-shooter AFAIK and therefore a breakthrough in realtime 3D. It's a little OT thinking of digital art, but since you brought up doom it's worth to be mentioned.

You might want to have look at "into the digital realm", a book about ILMs history. Some of these things are covered in it.

Good luck, I'd love to read the book!

[waylon]

Hi. Are you more concerned with low-end computer art, like what people were doing on home computers, or high-end stuff? You might want to take a look at some old Siggraph papers - they cover a lot of neat computer effects as they were being invented. But I don't know if you count that as "digital art", since it's more effects programming than art.

Also... back to home computers, along with the demo scene came an art scene, where you got stuff like ascii and ansi graphics, and later, ripterm. (maybe look at http://www.ice.org/ if you're not already familiar with it.)

[Mindsiphon]

Here are a couple of links that may be of interest.
http://www.accad.ohio-state.edu/~waynec/history/ID797.html
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ph/nyit/index.html

[Mindsiphon]

Here's another link.
Lot's of interesting links at the bottom of the page too.
http://www.accad.ohio-state.edu/~waynec/history/timeline.html

[Sumaleth]

Greetings one and all,

As of friday last week I now find myself unemployed (end of the contract, nothing sinistar) and have decided to spend a few months working on a project I've been wanting to do for a few years; a book about Digital Art.

I am actually a writer; I've written two movie scripts, a novella, and have more than 10 years experience doing journalist work (mainly relating to 'digial graphics'), so I'm ready to have a crack at it.

The title I'm working to at the moment is;

Digital Art - The History, the Artists, and their Techniques.

I want a complete history, feature bios on the leading digital artists around now, smaller bios on past artists whos work made a big impact, plus tutorials, tips, and general information about digital art. In otherwords; everything.

Here's the thing; there are some gaps in my knowledge. I need information on the following scenes;

. The Spectrum computer; any artists that might have been well known (there were a number on the C64, I assume there were similar artists doing cutting edge work on the speccy too).

. The Atari ST. I'm familiar with the Amiga scene, and there were a lot of crossover between the two platforms, but I don't know if there were any ST-specific artists whose work was leading edge.

. The PC, pre-Doom. After Doom I'm cool, but I don't know much about the PC before. I suspect that the pre-Doom era on the PC wasn't anything special (graphically), that was really the reign of the Amiga and ST systems, but I don't want to ignore the possibility of there being some important artists working in that period.

--

So if anyone was hardcore into any of those scenes I'd love to hear from them.

Other than that, if anyone wants to throw any section ideas for the book around I'm more than happy to read them. I'll be outlining the project for the next ~2 weeks, aiming to list -every- thing that I aim to include in the book. I already have a big list, but there's sure to be things I'll miss.

Row.

[discreet]

Wolfenstein wasn't 3d. It was all 2d.. same with Doom(2). Quake was the first true 3d.

[Freddio]

??

also shouldnt you say first real time 3d computer game?

[waylon]

discreet: You could argue that every video game which doesn't support 3D glasses isn't 3d, because it's projected on a 2d monitor.

Wolfenstein's enemies and stuff were 2d, but they were projected into 3d space, and the level actually WAS 3d (albeit, with some pretty hefty restrictions, like the fact that you couldn't have multiple heights, and everything was laid out in a grid.)

Anyway, there were a bunch of other 3d games out before wolfenstein, but they were all either wireframe or flat-shaded. Wolfenstein was a big step forward, so would probably be worth mentioning. Of course, while we're on art in games, you'd probably want to look at the early Sierra stuff...

Ack, ok, I think this conversation is getting a bit off-topic, and I don't think I'm helping one bit. Sumaleth, what areas of digital art are you looking at? Do you really care that much about early games? Or are you looking for more "art for its own sake" stuff?

[Sumaleth]

Thanks to everyone for the feedback.

gLitterbug:
The aim will be to include as much tutorial stuff as possible.

re Wolf:
This isn't a book about the game industry, it's purely about 'digital art'. Of course there will be mention of 3D, and there will also be many game artists mentioned, but the games themselves won't be a primary feature.

(Wolf wasn't the first First-Person game anyway

Jaymo:
I have that ILM book, will be using it for info.

Waylon:
I have ASCII and ANSI included, but I hadnt heard of ripterm. Thanks for the tip.

raist:
Excellent links, danke.

Waylon:
Sierra as in Kings Quest? Or something else? Really it'll be more about the artists though, although it may mention other sognificant events. We'll have to see.

Thanks all,
Row.

[ceenda]

Hi Suma.

Try the forums on The Little Green Desktop to find out about ST demo artists.
http://lgd.fatal-design.com

Also, there's info about the various demo artists on the website itself.

[gLitterbug]

Sorry if that doesn�t really belong here, but I think Ultima Underworld had a 3d-world with inclined planes(?) and was released way before quake! Quake just was the first game to feature 3d-polymodels.

Thx Sumaleth, I�m really looking forward to your book!

[Jezebel]

I remember the first first-person thing I played was Phantasy Star on my Sega Mastersystem. Not all of it was ofc, but the mazes and dungeons were all done in first person and I remember thinking it was the coolest thing ever at the time

[Subhuman]

That is so cool, do you have any idea on when you want it to hit the shelves?

[Francis]

I will buy this book too!

Will you be talking about the internet and web as well? I know that in addition to all the 2D and 3D tools, the web has had a giant impact on digital art, in terms of creating communities of artists and providing exposure. I'm sure a lot of people here feel as I do that without the web we could not reach as many people as we do, and consequently learn so much from each other.

Hope that made sense. Anyway, great idea, and I hope potential publishers think so too. Good luck with it!

[Impaler]

SumaRow: Are you going to include the whole artistic trend dealing with stuff that has nothing to do with photoshop and actual drawing? There's this whole branch of abstract digital art that uses technology as it's tool, rather than it's medium.

This one guy has a little 32^2 square that uses a script to change all of the pixels in a greyscale to all of the different combinations (there are trillions). It's been mentioned in Time and Newsweek a couple of times. This is just an example, but there are a lot of poshy new artist types that are getting all the rave from the Guggenheim (I almost died there last week) and periodicals.

Might be worth a larf. Other than that, I envy you, in that you can write a full book and hopefully get it published.

*nod*

[waylon]

Hi. Yeah, Sierra did King's Quest, and a bunch of other similar games. I think they were one of the first ones, actually, to use graphics in a video game. They basically made a text adventure, like Zork, with the addition of a picture for whatever room you were in. (I think it was called "Mystery House".) It was all vector based graphics, so it didn't look too good by today's standards, but it sure was neat at the time.

Ripterm was a vector-based graphics format. It was created so that BBSs could have a true graphical interface, instead of just ansi and ascii. It never really took off for BBSs, since you had to use a special terminal program (RipTerm), but art groups picked up on it and began including Rip graphics in their art packs. It was, in essence, a very early version of Flash (I think the first version was released in '92, though it didn't become popular until way after that.)

[Sumaleth]

Ceenda: great, thanks.

Subhuman: no idea, but I expect it'll take a while to finally see a shelf (assuming it finds a publisher).

Francis: I actually had web things on the list, but hadnt thought to group them under an 'internet' section, plus that lead to other ideas. Mucho danke.

Impaler: good question, and one I'm still struggling with. The idea was to have a good about digital -illustration- since that aspect of 'digital art' isn't as well covered as design or 'experimental' stuff. But they are important if you're talking about 'digital art'.

I'll stick to the original plan for now, see how it progresses.

Waylon: ripterm looks interesting, and there is quite a good scene about it (well it looked like there was). Thanks.

The Siera stuff is very interesting. I'm not sure it's important to the aim of the book, but knowing the first game to have artwork would be cool. Will need to look into that further.

Thanks all,
Row.

[three55ml]

Oh man, bringing back the memories. RIPTerm was so cool back in the days of BBSs. It gave the user a graphical UI to the whole board. I used to run a board that had RIP as well as standard ANSI. Those were the days I don't remember if it was vector or not, but I seem to remember there become a whole horde of RIP paint programs (RIPPaint or RIPDraw come to mind???). Anyways, it was actually a decent sized craze in the BBS and door game (mostly RPG) community for a while.

[ShadowDragon]

Hey, i don't know if anyone's still looking at this, but anyway...
Suma, are you going to mention the 3D side of digital arts as well or just 2D stuff?

[Sumaleth]

Shadow:

I intend to cover 2D, 3D, 2D/3D mixes, and even a little traditional/2D mixing.

Row.