What is a Concept Artist?

Nacho Yagüe, art director for Gameloft, explains what a concept artist is

Creating settings, scenes, and environments is an essential part of developing any game. Nacho Yagüe is an art director and concept artist who has worked on Ubisoft games such as Assassins Creed: Unity, Watch Dogs 2, and Splinter Cell: Blacklist. He is an expert in designing levels, textures, and animations for video game concept art.

To help us to better understand what this profession entails, Nacho explains a concept artist’s role in the video game industry. He also shares some examples that will give you a better idea of the type of work they produce and where they fit in the production process for developing a new video game.

What is a concept artist?

There’s a lot of misinformation about this profession. People tend to think that our job is to make incredible images, and that's it. It's the opposite. What we do is solve problems. This applies both to art direction, such as deciding how best to adorn a room, or more technical complications such as working out what light to use in a certain scene.

What is the main task of a concept artist?

To make the production process easier for the artists. It's much cheaper to make four or five drawings than a 3D test, so that's where we come in. It involves talking with the art director and designers for hours, taking lots of time to think, producing, and problem-solving.

Could you give those who aren’t familiar with the video games industry a similar example that helps explain the role of a concept artist?

Let's take fashion design. Before a designer starts fitting patterns and cutting expensive fabrics, someone else (or the designer themself) draws a couple of designs on paper first to see if they will work. That's exactly what we do in video games and concept art; we create 2D tests that are much faster to produce to check that everything is going to work well in production.

What’s another example of the sort of work you do daily?

If we look at the following image from Assassin's Creed Unity from Ubisoft Toronto, it seems fairly polished. However, there was a lot of concept art work behind it. This phase of the game takes place in a pantheon in Paris. It's a huge building that required a lot of textures and was a real challenge for the artists when it came to adding decorative details and adornments. The room is full of frescoes, sculptures, and figures that expand the game vertically; in other words, not only do you have the opportunity to explore the game at floor level, but also climb on roofs, climb walls, etc.

They showed me the 3D image they had built using real references of the pantheon and asked me to solve problems they were encountering.

How did you find a solution?

I had the idea that the pantheon could still be being built. This way, there could be scaffolding attached to the frescoes for the protagonist to climb, and the paintings would only be half painted. This meant they could avoid having to make unique textures for every fresco and instead only needed a couple for the walls. It also meant that some sculptures could be wrapped in sheets, and so they could repeat statues without them being so noticeable. I also corrected some lighting issues so that the image would look better as a whole.

Nacho Yagüe teaches the Domestika course Concept Art for Video Games. Learn to create concept art, taking into account elements of video game design such as designing levels, textures, and animations.

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