X-Rebirth美工Alex Preuss的采访

FreemanGL

http://www.cgsociety.org/index.p ... Special/alex_preuss

文章翻译见6楼。

0809000

CGSociety :: Artist Profile
23 September 2011
                       
               
    Some people fall into fulltime positions in great companies, others jump from freelance appointments, happy to build on experience with different crowds every few months. EgoSoft GmbH found Alex Preuss and the company and artist have been collaborating for years now, working on a SciFi Fantasy game franchise that fits his passion for fantastical vistas.
               
    In 1990 a young Alex Preuss took an apprenticeship as a mechanist at the ‘Aachener Maschienenbau GmbH’ (AMBA) company, a large German industrial engineering firm. Throughout his life, Alex’s father convinced him to finish projects he started. Even though he wanted to move into the arts so badly, he didn’t quit and he stayed for some years, gathering a pretty good wage. Alex still keeps this advice in his more contemporary game projects.
                        
    With this wage, he bought himself an AMIGA 2000 and the painting software D-Paint 2, and he began creating a lot of images in 320 x 240 pixel resolution.
                        
    "A friend showed my work to the CEO of Egosoft GmbH, Bernd Lehahn," explains Alex Preuss, "and after the first meeting I had my first job working on a game." Straight after he finished with his apprenticeship as a mechanist at AMBA, Alex was hired by Egosoft to work on an new point and click adventure called ‘Imperium Romanum’ and soon after became the lead artist of the company.
               
               
    "The first real big thing after 'Imperium Romanum' for me was the “X-Beyond the Frontier”, the first part of the X Series," says Preuss. He learned 3D in a totally different way to many other people these days. The first models for the game where done by hand, by using graph paper, a calculator and notepad. Alex painted the geometry in top, side and front views on paper and translating the coordinates into a VRML format. "It took me days to make something complex," understates Preuss. The first two games were written for the Amiga but later switched in favor of the PC.                                       
    "The old X games are best known for their great playground, for their complexity and above all that you have the freedom to do whatever you want,"e says Preuss. "X-Rebirth is the next instalment and a reboot of the series. We have put a lot of new great features, ideas, and effort into this new game."
               
    "When I rejoined Egosoft back in 2008, my first months on this project were focused on concepts. Christian Vogel; my precursor as lead in the company had huge visual plans for this project and we both sat down and started to block out shapes and forms. We tried to find a good workflow to achieve all the great stuff we wanted to have in the end. Unfortunately he left the company in early 2010 and from this point it was a hard task to bring all this together. The X-Rebirth project at that point, was a long way from being finished."
               
               

X-Rebirth concept art.               
    Preuss needed a short time to get back to his origins as a lead artist, because too much had changed since he'd left the game industry in 2002. "The tools had become more complex, the possibilities what you are able to do with our new game engine are far beyond what they were when I last worked in the industry," he says.
               
    X-Rebirth is in general a space simulation where you play a young and ambitious hero with a very special and unique spaceship. The challenge is to survive in a vast, dangerous, but living and breathing universe. The basic rules are trade, fight, build and think.
               
    As the player of X-Rebirth, you have the freedom to do almost everything in this game, like traveling to every point in the universe, to dogfight with enemies, strategic battles with armadas of capital ships, build your own ships, stations and economy, or trade with aliens for goods and weapons, and a lot more.
               
               

X-Rebirth Screens.               

0809000

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Alexander Preuss is well known for ‘The broken Armistice over Abalakin’ which he created for CGSociety’s Grand Space Opera CGChallenge in 2005. “This was my favorite project,’ he says. ‘It was more or less the first project I created without huge problems. This was a long time ago of course. It was great fun to read every day the great feedback in the CGTalk forum. The follow up image was The Return to Abalakin, where I wanted to show how such a giant construction would look from the inside and how civilisations could live there.” Preuss has not only won 3D First Prize in CGChallenges in the past, but also has work in Ballistic Publishing's EXPOSE 3, EXPOSE 4 and EXPOSE 8, d'artiste: Matte Painting 2, Elemental 2 and Elemental 3.

Preuss worked in many companies in his native Germany in his time venturing outside of the EgoSoft Game Studio. He was an illustrator at Centipede Press and Subterranean Press and was Art Director at Image Arts GmbH. However his heart was drawn back into the EgoSoft world.

At the very beginning of his career, Alex was almost only focused on 3D works, and sometimes 3D with no post processing afterwards. He learned very quickly that to generate what was in his mind took a little more than soley 3D so he began mixing things up, creating Photoshop textures and environments.

The immersive powers of 2D illustrations and concept art brought on new work for Preuss, and almost all of it in Photoshop, albeit with some elements of 3D, using ZBrush and 3ds Max with mental ray.

COLORS

Choosing the right colors to achieve the right mood are the fundamentals of every work, and Alex uses both pro tools and the odd free web app to find the right hue for a job. "What I do very often in the creation process of a image is a levels tuning in Photoshop on the current painted layer, to bring the image slowly into the right direction. I continue this step then several times until I have a nice basis for the final touch. At the end I love to place a photo filter on top to tint the work slightly into a specific mood.  

"This is just one way and there are several other good ways to bring work into the right mood. And there are some tools which are free to use and also very helpful to find harmonic color settings, such as ColorBlender, which can help you to find a nice palette just on the basis of one single color.

LIGHTS

"Shadow and light is what gives depth to an work and makes it more intense for the viewer. I play a lot with light and shadows in my works, almost tending to get a bit too dark in most of them, but I love what light is able to do with a work. Having good lights and shadows can push an illustration or rendering even further.

ADVICE

Painting or 3D modeling tools available at the very beginning of Alex's career were apps like Deluxe Paint or Turbo Silver, where you needed days to render a simple scene or painted works on a pixel basis. That was of course fun and the results where quite impressive, well at least for these times. "My main goals for the future are to focus a bit more on concept art and especially even traditional art, an area where an artist can create something clearly unique in that medium," he says.

Related LinksAlexander Preuss

• Egosoft
• X-Rebirth
• ColorBlender
• EXPOSE 3
• EXPOSE 4
• EXPOSE 8
• Matte Painting 2
  
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jollibee

和谐还真是无处不在啊.

0809000

jollibee 发表于 2011-9-25 12:43
为何要审核自己的帖子?

因为帖子里有我不知道的关键字....

jollibee

纯E盲参照字典乱翻，望见谅！还望大家指点其中的错误。

ALEX简介：
Some people fall into fulltime positions in great companies, others jump from freelance appointments, happy to build on experience with different crowds every few months. EgoSoft GmbH found Alex Preuss and the company and artist have been collaborating for years now, working on a SciFi Fantasy game franchise that fits his passion for fantastical vistas.
      一些人全身心投入到全职工作中,其他人则离开作为自由职业者,和不同的人群交流经验长达数月。ALEX和其他设计师已经一起为开发科幻游戏工作了数年,他提出了很多奇特的想法。
         
    In 1990 a young Alex Preuss took an apprenticeship as a mechanist at the ‘Aachener Maschienenbau GmbH’ (AMBA) company, a large German industrial engineering firm. Throughout his life, Alex’s father convinced him to finish projects he started. Even though he wanted to move into the arts so badly, he didn’t quit and he stayed for some years, gathering a pretty good wage. Alex still keeps this advice in his more contemporary game projects.
     在1990年，年轻的ALEX在一家非常大的德国工业工程公司(AMBA)作为机械师实习。在平时，alex的父亲就教导他做事要善始善终。尽管他非常想转作设计师，但是他还是在那里呆了很多年，并且积攒了一笔相当可观的工资。ALEX在他的很多代游戏项目中一直谨父亲的教诲。
                        
    With this wage, he bought himself an AMIGA 2000 and the painting software D-Paint 2, and he began creating a lot of images in 320 x 240 pixel resolution.
    他用这笔工资为自己购买了AMIGA2000和绘画软件DP2，并开始创作大量的320*240分辨率的图片。
                        
    "A friend showed my work to the CEO of Egosoft GmbH, Bernd Lehahn," explains Alex Preuss, "and after the first meeting I had my first job working on a game." Straight after he finished with his apprenticeship as a mechanist at AMBA, Alex was hired by Egosoft to work on an new point and click adventure called ‘Imperium Romanum’ and soon after became the lead artist of the company.
    “一个朋友将的作品展示给了EGOSOFT的CEO”，他说道，“在首次会面后，我拥有了我的第一份在游戏行业的工作。”在他完成在AMBA的机械师实习后，EGOSOFT正式雇佣了他为《罗马帝国》这款游戏工作。不久后他成为了公司的首席设计师。
      
               
    "The first real big thing after 'Imperium Romanum' for me was the “X-Beyond the Frontier”, the first part of the X Series," says Preuss. He learned 3D in a totally different way to many other people these days. The first models for the game where done by hand, by using graph paper, a calculator and notepad. Alex painted the geometry in top, side and front views on paper and translating the coordinates into a VRML format. "It took me days to make something complex," understates Preuss. The first two games were written for the Amiga but later switched in favor of the PC.
    “对我来说，在《罗马帝国》之后的真正的大项目是《X-Beyond the Frontier》，X系列的第一部分，”ALEX说道。他通过不同方法向很多人学习3D技术。游戏的第一个模组是通过手工、图纸，一个计算器和笔记本完成的。ALEX在纸上描绘顶部、侧部以及前部视角，并把坐标转换成VRML格式。“把它们合成在一起花了我很多时间。”最初的两个游戏是关于Amiga的，但后来转向了PC？   
                                      
    "The old X games are best known for their great playground, for their complexity and above all that you have the freedom to do whatever you want,"e says Preuss. "X-Rebirth is the next instalment and a reboot of the series. We have put a lot of new great features, ideas, and effort into this new game."
    “以往的X系列游戏的设计非常棒，它拥有庞大的宇宙空间，复杂的设定，你可以做你想做的任何事，”ALEX说道。“X重生是X系列的重写，我们为这个新游戏加入了一些新的、非常棒的功能和创意，并全力投入这个游戏中。”

               
    "When I rejoined Egosoft back in 2008, my first months on this project were focused on concepts. Christian Vogel; my precursor as lead in the company had huge visual plans for this project and we both sat down and started to block out shapes and forms. We tried to find a good workflow to achieve all the great stuff we wanted to have in the end. Unfortunately he left the company in early 2010 and from this point it was a hard task to bring all this together. The X-Rebirth project at that point, was a long way from being finished."
    “我在2008年重新回到了EGOSOFT公司。在头个月里，我集中精力思考关于游戏的概念问题。Christian Vogel，我的前辈，公司的领导，他有一个庞大的关于这个项目的可视化计划 。我们坐下来并开始绘制草画和表格。我们尝试找出一个好的工作流程，来实施最终我们想要的、非常棒的东西。不幸的是，他在2010年早些时候离开了公司。就这点来说，X重生成了一项非常困难的工作。那时候，X重生项目变成了遥遥无期。”
   
   
X重生的设计概念：              
    Preuss needed a short time to get back to his origins as a lead artist, because too much had changed since he'd left the game industry in 2002. "The tools had become more complex, the possibilities what you are able to do with our new game engine are far beyond what they were when I last worked in the industry," he says.
    alex需要一段时间来回归到他的起源地,并作为首席美工。因为自从他在2002年离开了游戏行业后,发生了太多的变化。“工具变得非常复杂，我们的新游戏引擎能做什么的可能性已远远超出想象."

               
    X-Rebirth is in general a space simulation where you play a young and ambitious hero with a very special and unique spaceship. The challenge is to survive in a vast, dangerous, but living and breathing universe. The basic rules are trade, fight, build and think.
    X重生大体上来讲是一个模拟空间，你可以化身为一个年轻的、野心勃勃的英雄，驾驶着一艘非常独特并且唯一的飞船。挑战就是如何在一个浩瀚、危险并且正在成长的宇宙中生存下来。   

               
    As the player of X-Rebirth, you have the freedom to do almost everything in this game, like traveling to every point in the universe, to dogfight with enemies, strategic battles with armadas of capital ships, build your own ships, stations and economy, or trade with aliens for goods and weapons, and a lot more.
    作为X重生的玩家，你几乎拥有在游戏中做任何事的自由，可以在宇宙中进行贸易、和敌人混战、比拼舰队战略战术、建造你自己的船只，空间站和经济体系，或者和外星生物进行贸易进而获取货物、武器，甚至更多。
   

lemorefly

他的父亲一直想说服他完成他最初的计划。尽管他非常想转作设计师，但是他还是在那里呆了很多年，并且积攒了一笔相当可观的工资。ALEX在他的很多现代游戏项目中一直持有这个想法。（这句不懂）
-----------------------------------
这句的意思是

“Throughout his life, Alex’s father convinced him to finish projects he started. ”在平时，alex的父亲就教导他做事要善始善终
“Even though he wanted to move into the arts so badly, he didn’t quit and he stayed for some years, gathering a pretty good wage.”所以尽管他非常想转行做美工，但他还是没有辞职并在那呆了几年，攒下了一笔可观的工资。
“Alex still keeps this advice in his more contemporary game projects.”在这之后的游戏美工生涯里，alex一直遵循着父亲的这一教诲。

通篇基本是在讲这位美工的生平。

maozexi

翻译工作真是辛苦啊
图很期待啊