BADiDEAfactory.com

Cake toppers

2012-03-15T11:54:00.000-07:00

I made these for our wedding back in October.

ImagineFX

2012-03-13T21:55:00.001-07:00

Click my PORTFOLiO tab to see my video and concept art gallery.

Check out my step-by-step tutorial in this months ImagineFX Magazine.

Click for high res final image.

Also, don't forget to sign up or tell a friend, the upcoming session of FuturePoly classes are filling up fast for the next quarter. Just take a look at the awesome student gallery! Come get your learn on!!

Kotaku shoutout

2011-10-26T09:36:00.003-07:00

Kotaku gave me a nice shoutout! I read Kotaku every day. Bromance!

My Happy Book!

2011-10-25T08:16:00.002-07:00

Hey, check out my new blog where I post my doodles, old and new, good and bad, rough sketches and birthday cards for my family. HORIA'S HAPPY BOOK!

GamesCom trailer!

2011-10-25T07:56:00.000-07:00

Here's the new trailer I boarded and directed for Guild Wars 2. The game is looking awesome, and I'm really stoked about how nice the painterly intro stuff turned out!

Guild Wars 2 lore and game-play trailer for Gamescom 2011

Horia Dociu ,Director, storyboards, in-game camera

Illustrations by Levi Hopkins, Kekai Kotaki, Daniel Dociu

Pre-rendered motion graphics and compositing by Matthew Oswald
In-game cinematic motion graphics animation by ArenaNet Cinematic Team

Goin' Commando!

2011-10-25T07:52:00.000-07:00

I came up with an April fools' prank for Guild Wars 2 last year, and with the help of some of my talented ArenaNet friends, it was a giant success!
Check out the official page, and some more behind the scenes on the Arena blog.

Photo-chopped sketch I did for our character modeler, Delly Sartika.

I thought it'd be cool to have a modern shooter style military character as our "next playable profession". So after a lot of prep work, I shot full on skill videos, like we do for all the real in-game professions and I coordinated with my buddies so that across the board, from our web releases to interviews and model renders, our "Commando" roll-out was as believable as possible. The joke page got more facebook shares in three days than any of the other professions got in months up on the site!

rough sketch

2011-09-14T08:03:00.001-07:00

Logan and Caithe sketch

2011-07-22T20:16:00.003-07:00

CD cover

2011-07-06T13:37:00.000-07:00

Our sweet GW2 cinematics!

2011-07-01T08:21:00.000-07:00

Here's the real-time-rendered, in-game-cinematic-cut-scene for the Guild Wars 2 "Catacombs" dungeon. I directed this and drew up the story boards- big huge high five to my kick-ass team for hitting such a high quality bar. I think it came out super nice and I'm glad we get to share it before the game is out!

Kevin Dart's "Yuki-7: Looks That Kill"

2011-06-28T18:47:00.000-07:00

My good friends at Fleetstreet Scandal are back with a new drop-dead gorgeous Yuki-7 book! Peep the absurdly stylish new animated trailer below, go buy the book, and then get sad cuz you'll never be that cool... at least that's what I'm going to do!

Check out Kevin and Stephane's awesome short!!!

The piece I did for the last Yuki-7 book is for sale at Nucleus Gallery.

FantaSci space marine

2011-05-05T19:28:00.000-07:00

This pic is in the new d'artiste Character Design book featuring my good friend Kekai!! Pic it up and check out his sweet tutorials to learn how to paint like a real badass :)

You can flip through the book digitally at www.BallisticPublishing.com

FuturePoly, now online!

2011-03-15T23:20:00.000-07:00

Check out our new online course. Eight artists, eight weeks, streaming LIVE workshops with review/feedback forums available to attendees for the duration of the class. More info here, it's filling up and space is limited!

Also, back at the last Anomaly workshop, held in Vancouver Canada at their awesome aquarium, I got to meet Craig Mullins. You jelly? Jason Stokes and opened for his lecture. Here's a sweet photo of me and Stokes tearin' it up on the ones and twos talking about organic 2D/3D video game art production pipelines and what lessons aspiring artists can take away to improve their portfolio's relevance.

Also, check out the sweet new FuturePoly forums and see what you're missing!

Ninja Stress Toy

2011-02-24T17:52:00.000-08:00

So this company called Wet Paint wanted a little ninja mascot and asked for some sketches so they could make stress-ball toy. I don't know why. So I thought I'd make him very 2D in concept and look a like a paint splatter/paint drop to tie in to the whole Wet Paint thing. I thought the round shapes also worked well for the foam toy. They liked it, but it never went into production. Again, I don't know why. Here's the proof model the poor sculpt company made for free. Pretty snazzy. I don't know the company's name, unfortuantely, but they did a great job! Pretty fun to see your stuff in real 3D, be jealous.

Huts and Mills

2011-01-21T20:10:00.000-08:00

Early Charrchitecture concepts for GW2.

Doodle boards...

2011-01-07T20:19:00.000-08:00

Some random cut n' paste boards n' frames...

This is what we do!

2010-11-04T23:27:00.000-07:00

Here's a little video we put together for the ArenaNet Blog to give people a sneak peak at what cinematics look like in Guild Wars 2, as well as a quick look at what my team does to make this stuff happens.

Official ArenaNet Blog HERE

"This Is What We Do" by MC Hammer HERE

I hate dem pesky toitles!

2010-10-05T20:22:00.000-07:00

Beebop n' Rocksteady!!

Digital painting demo from one of my FuturePoly classes.

Life drawings...

2010-09-29T23:17:00.000-07:00

A couple of poses from the Seattle lab. 3min poses.

GW2 Manifesto

2010-09-29T12:15:00.001-07:00

Here's the trailer I directed for ArenaNet's Guild Wars 2 Manifesto. It was designed as a direct dialogue between us, as developers, and our fans. The live action portions (green screen and motion graphics animation by gNet) convey in very clear terms the impact of our game's core features on, not only the Guild Wars 2 experience, but pushing the entire MMO genre.

As the director, it was my hands-on responsibility to coordinate the integration and design of all of the in-game footage I story boarded and shot, the illustrations, background art, live action footage, game capture and motion graphics elements created in house, as well as the outsourced green screen and mo-graph animation done by the external studio gNet.

BeautifulGrim.org

2010-09-25T11:42:00.000-07:00

This Guild Wars 2 concept for the "Order of Whispers" was also sold at the Beautiful Grim charity auction.

Ratlizard

2010-09-25T11:40:00.000-07:00

Monster concept just for fun.

FuturePoly OPEN FOR BUSINESS!!

2010-03-04T00:14:00.002-08:00

RELEVANT EDUCATION.
FuturePoly is our new digital arts training studio. Owner Jason Stokes, myself, and a host of top industry artists will be teaching a variety of classes related specifically to game art. If you want to pursue a career in the interactive entertainment industry, this is a serious, one-stop shop for everything you need to learn to set yourself on a strong trajectory toward landing your dream job. With a full curriculum for beginners or re-specialization as well as seminars for-pros-by-pros, FuturePoly is going to quickly become a name synonymous with the growth of the north-west digital arts community and top tier trade education. For more information, please visit our website www.FuturePoly.com and come get your effing learn on.

What? That's the best log you've ever seen? Yeah, well guess who designed it... me. I designed the logo for FuturePoly. Boom, that's how I roll!

"The Art of Guild Wars 2" book for sale!

2010-03-04T00:13:00.001-08:00

This 128 page hardcover features 270 gorgeous images ranging from beautifully rendered concept illustrations to exploration sketches and schematics; this immersion into Arena's artistic process is a must see for GW fans and art lovers alike. Grab your copy today, you won't regret it!

Europe/North America BUY HERE!

I did a lot of the production on this book; editing, coordination and most importantly hiring the very talented Andrio Abero to layout the book. The cover is a composite of many artists' production sketches, laid out by art director Daniel Dociu. Above is one of my pieces featured in the book, it's meant as a dwelling for the Sylvari, a magical race of plant-people.

My Guild Wars 2 trailer is live!

2010-03-04T00:12:00.000-08:00

Here's the GW2 debut trailer I directed! It was my responsibility to come up with the concept, edit the script, story board the animatic and make sure the execution was spot on, from start through the entirety of production. I also shot the in-game footage. A lot of talented people are working on this game and the trailer had to make sure their game was shown in the best light and presented in a way that would not only satisfy a dedicated fan base, but also intrigue potential fans from new demographics. Kekai Kotaki did the majority of the illustrations along with Daniel Dociu, the art director.

We've been working on the game for a while and its looking more and more like the concept art! I'm happy to say that both the in-game and the entire animated portions of the trailer were all done 100% in house! I'm stoked to get to work with such a rad team!

Seductive Espionage: The World of Yuki 7

2010-03-04T00:11:00.000-08:00

Framed, signed, 1/1 print available at Gallery Nucleus

Animation artist Kevin Dart, of Fleet Street Scandal, has put out a gorgeous new book based on his fictional 60's spy heroine. Entitled Seductive Espionage: The World of Yuki 7, the book features some stunning new work from Kevin as well as a variety of fun pieces from some very talented guest artists, and was written by Ada Cole. You really need to hold this l book in your hands to appreciate just how f*cking cool it is. I'm super excited that Kevin asked me to do a piece for the book, and it actually holds up alright next to the sky high talent Kevin rounded up.
Order the book today or check out the limited Collectors Edition!!!

Lastly, don't miss the absurdly stylish promo trailer animated by Stephane Coedel!!!

Photos courtesy of Dan Cole.

Published

2010-03-04T00:10:00.000-08:00

I got a couple pieces published in Ballistic Publishing's Expose 7 as well as this months Imagine FX magazine. You can flip through Expose and all the other Ballistic books on their site using a virtual pages flash book, pretty neat!

d'artiste Digital Painting 2

2010-03-04T00:09:00.002-08:00

Ballistic Publishing's 2nd Digital Painting tutorial book came out a bit ago, and features one of my Guild Wars concepts in the invited artist section of Daniel's tutorial. Pick up this book for some rad, extremely detailed and informative setp-by-step tutorials and tips to achieve some amazing final results.'

Danbo...

2010-03-04T00:09:00.001-08:00

A doodle I did for the sketchwich blog.

"Badass" character

2010-03-04T00:08:00.002-08:00

I tried to get a few different themes going to make the character more appealing. Her tech gear is not only a good thematic juxtaposition to her organic wing, but together, they help create the strong silhouette, which was my main focus in this piece. The S&M outfit and reptile theme give her additional interest. I could see her in a 3D fighting game, like Soul Calibur, or maybe a good boss character in a shooter.

Last Man Standing [round 2]

2010-03-04T00:08:00.001-08:00

Here's my 2nd round entry for "Last Man Standing" on ConceptArt.org. The theme this time was 'outbreak'. I didn't want to do zombies at first, because I thought it cliché, but I this idea was fun enough...

GW2 Hero

2010-03-04T00:06:00.000-08:00

This concept is from before GW2 development really started, for the human hero role in a trailer cinematic.. the character ended up being "Logan Thakery"- Kekai did the final badass concept.

Also, if you've not already, do yourself a favor and pick up Valve's Orange Box (PC, 360, PS3! Besides the full collection of the genuinely fun and great looking Half-Life 2 games, OB includes Portal, a really neat first-person-view puzzle game developed by DigiPen students, and one my favorite looking games of all time, Team Fortress 2! TF2 was art-directed by Moby Francke, and executed by Valve's strongest artistic team. It's beyond refreshing to see such a rad looking game do so well amongst its rehash-of-a-rehash competitors. Most importantly though, HL2: Episode 2 still uses props I made for the original game, so I can put it on my resume :)

Last Man Standing [round one]

2010-03-04T00:04:00.000-08:00

Last Man Standing is a ConceptArt.org illustration competition. It's a fun way for everyone on the forum to interact and match their stuff against their online comrades. This is the 3rd time the competition has been put on, here's how it works: you get devided up randomly in groups of five contestants. A theme is assigned for the round, and everyone has to send their piece to the moderator to be posted on the forum on the due date. Then the judges declare a winner for each group, and those individuals move on to the next round where they compete against other winners from the last round. The groups get smaller and smaller and the competition more and more intense, until, finally, there's only one, man, standing.... or woman... Anyways, check out my piece for round one, it got me into the second round. Wish me luck on my next piece!

Sketchwich.com

2010-03-04T00:03:00.002-08:00

If you've somehow seen my site but haven't visited Sketchwich, do so now! Its a blog where all my ArenaNet homies post personal work for critique and friendly competition. It's honestly the most inspirational site I visit. Seeing super rad life drawings or digital illos, cartoon sketches and oil painting by the guys you sit next to everyday, really brings it home. Here’s a speedy illo I did for the weekly topic: "futuristic". I made myself finish it in one sitting so I wouldn’t drag it on and then decide I didn’t like it. Meh, lessons learned.

GW mission pack ninjas

2010-03-04T00:03:00.001-08:00

Wow, I've been at Arena.Net for FOUR years now! It's been an amazing place to work, mainly because of the friends I've made there, and the strong sense of artistic community we've established and maintained.

The Ninja Guard concept above is for the Guild Wars downloadable content pack. The sketches below are my rough comps for the loading screen to the level these guards appear in.

The ones I like most were too action oriented to be a loading screen. I ended up going with the one on the bottom left because it tells the story it needs to, and it had a sense of suspense which is appropriate for a load screen.

When I had to draw the in-game storybook pages for that mission's epilogue, one of the load screen sketches was a perfect fit for the script, so with a quick paint over it turned into one of the six panels below.

Today's lesson? ...recycle! :)

Eye of the North

2010-03-04T00:02:00.001-08:00

At 12:01am on Friday Guild Wars: Eye of the North went live! This is our fourth game, an expansion to the previous Guild Wars titles, Prophecies, Factions and Nightfall.

This is the in-game cinematic trailer I directed.

While I did a few environmental props and a couple concepts toward the beginning of the project,my main focus was story-boarding and directing the in-game cut scenes. Our tools and technical limitations were a gant hurdle to overcome, to say the least, but I feel the scenes we really had time to polish look great regardless. Overall, I really think this is Arena.Net's best looking game so far, on all fronts. I’ll take this opportunity to reiterate what a pleasure and honor it is working with such amazingly talented artists and friends.

Here's the trailer I made for the follow-up downloadable mission pack, again using clips from the in game cinematics is story-boarded and directed.

Penny Arcade Expo

2010-03-04T00:01:00.001-08:00

The 2007 Penny Arcade Expo was held in Seattle for the first time. I was there for portfolio reviews at the ArenaNet booth. I also spoke on the PAX panel "Visual Design in Games Today." It was a lot of fun answering questions from people starting out in the industry, looking for tips and trying to find out what the art side of the game creation is all about. It was paneled with Dan Paladin (the dude who drew/animated everything on Alien Hominid), Art We (Art Director on the Penny Arcade game) and Paul Whitehead (Environment Lead at Suckerpunch). All the dudes were incredibly nice and we were all basically on the same page, so I think we gave solid advice.

After the panel I reviewed portfolios at the Arena booth. The general buzz about the Guild Wars Eye of the North was really good. Other than that, I saw hardcore PC gamers, LARPers, cos-players, and table-top dungeon crawlers getting their nerd on. That's PAX.

2007-05-15T23:14:00.000-07:00

Almost a year since the last post- nice! Thought it'd be a good idea to just keep random notes here for the day/week whatever- so here goes:

Today, the importance of silhouette, volume, faces and hands was brought to my attention for some reason. Random I know, but it kinda hit me for out of the blue, that if you nail these things, the drawing's as good as done... I mean perspective, lighting and a whole mess of other things are important, but in quick storyboard sketches, those are four things I tend to gloss over and reverting to my shortcuts is not helping me. So, note to self, work on those bits for now!

Also, I saw the Ratatouille book today at work -my copy's on its way- it was pretty inspiring. I loved the rad animator pencil sketches of the rats, the cool character maquettes, and of course the lighting studies by everyone’s' favorite, Dominique Louis. This book is probably my 2nd favorite after Monster's Inc. but I'll decide that once I get mine home for closer inspection :)

2006-07-12T23:53:00.000-07:00

It's been a while, but no matter how far apart, I WILL keep making posts.

My buddy Nic- whos a musician, a singer, came by tonight to watch the new season of Project Runway. I like hearing what he's up to, because he's so different from me, and what he does is so different, but as an artist its cool to hear him talk about what he does musically, becuase I can draw parallels from his work to drawing etc. He played some insturmental tracks from an upcoming project, and proceeded to sing, loudly, over the music. He's not shy, but he's also not a showoff, so it felt like there was some trust there too, since the work is so young. He even began to start coming up with some melodies for a track he'd not yet listened to and so I asked him a lot of questions about his process and what he does to take a song from a to z.

The process to writing lyrics and a melody, not surprisingly, is just like painting and concepting... Its just how my dad describes charcoal drawing, "...like a camera coming into focus slowly... large general soft shapes, lights and darks, and eventually crisp details and accents that make it a polished piece." Same as writing, same as all concepting, a couple little bits stand out or are dictated, and the rest must be broadly and organically laid down and built apon.

After finding the key, Nic hums along with the song where he feels its right, maybe spitting out a couple of words or sounds that pop into his head, and just getting a general mood and feeling from the song. The tricky lines and words come later, working in reverse would create a constipated, shoe-horned end product that would aboslutly lack the free spirited work that is in tune with the track its layed over, when the right process is followed. Thats what I think all artists would tell you.

Comercial art tends to put bullet points and limitations on the end product, but if you keep this process in mind, always, you can flow around the stones they throw in your creative river and flawlessly accomplish the task while adhering to the guidlines. Thats IF you remember and practice the process.... "creative river" did everyone like that one? That is poetry my friends lol.

Thanks for coming by Nic- its a pleasure to talk to you about this stuff, you know I'm down to do this any time... and I'm genuinly stoked for you and all your exciting new stuff! You deserve it.

H

3:33 am, a good time to start

2006-04-08T03:34:00.000-07:00

It's always a good idea to do things at this hour... last week I bought that $130 80's Gold CD collection, this week why not start a blog right?!