Title: DRIVE
Author: Scott Robertson
Publisher: Design Studio Press
Release Date: November 10th, 2010
“Scott Robertson’s DRIVE is both cool and badass.”
For more than a decade, concept designer Scott Robertson has been creating characters, worlds, and vehicles for video games and movies. His work spans from race cars to alien ships, and everywhere in-between. When he isn’t working on projects in the entertainment industry, he publishes coffee table collections of his artwork. His latest book, DRIVE, is a collection of concepts that showcases the process of developing vehicles for video games, from early sketches to final proposals.
Normally, these art books are collections of years of an artist’s work. Robertson produces one each year, and includes all new art based on a specific theme. DRIVE was done this way… in only 5 months. Granted, he worked with two interns over the course of two Summers (the tail end of 2009 and the beginning of Summer 2010) the quick compilation was nonetheless a huge undertaking.
Robertson explains to us that the two most important descriptive words used in entertainment design are “cool” and “badass“, and even those can be vaguely interpreted. It’s only until a game producer agrees that something is extremely cool and extremely badass that it gets pushed through.
With DRIVE Robertson wanted to have as much freedom to create cool and badass vehicles as possible, by focusing on four very different design themes: aerospace (think Mass Effect), military (a futuristic CoD), prosport (Split/Second), and salvage (Borderlands). Within each of these themes, Robertson developed a sports car, an off-road vehicle, a “big truck”, and motorcycles. Having just come off of completing Mass Effect 2, I found the aerospace theme to be extremely enticing. There’s just something about space-age minimalism that gets me every time.
The images are gorgeous — it’s the kind of stuff that you wouldn’t mind hanging on the wall of your cubicle, the desktop of your PC, or seeing on the intro screen of the latest Halo project. They capture moods, emotion, and fantasy, each as striking as the one before it. But that’s not what makes this book special.
The real magic is in the process of creation. From initial pen sketch to final digital painting, DRIVE details the steps that Robertson takes to create a vehicle set within a specific environment. It seems effortless, to the point where I feel like I can grab a piece of paper and do the same. Seeing how a design is developed, with the thoughts that go along with it, puts into perspective the amount of work that concept artists really need to go through to create a vehicle that works right, looks right, and feels right. The vehicles in DRIVE start as rough doodles, but through laborious work across two-page spreads they culminate in glorious images of weathered, worn, and stylized people-movers, in motion across deserts or in tunnels, in races or on strange planets.
The principle focus is that as long as 70% of the vehicle seems familiar — silhouette, stance, proportion — the remaining 30% can be completely original. You don’t have to actually design a Corvette to make a car look like one, just as long as it’s low to the ground, wide, and has a long hood. Add turrets, vents, and angular form language and the gamer will still consider the car to be Corvette-ish. It’s more about the emotional reaction to the vehicle: in the first 3 seconds, the player will see it, react to it, and decide whether to choose it or not. Luckily, the majority of the vehicles in DRIVE all fall into that former category.
I also loved seeing the different techniques that Robertson used to create the images. Whether using a 10% gray marker, creating collages of photographs of airplanes at an air museum, or modeling the images in modo each method leads to a unique design. The use of sketching tool Alchemy, for instance, creates wild abstract digital paintings that focus more on color and form rather than line drawings or details. It’s a bit of art geekery that is appreciated.
However he made each image, its easy to cone away from each page with a bit of awe. This is where game designs come from. The cool ones. The badass ones. DRIVE is the perfect aspirational art book for those of us interested in creating, as well as those of us that are perfectly fine leaving the creation up to the masters. And even though the vehicle fan will probably like this more than the Street Fighter fan, DRIVE is as cool and badass as concept art books can get.
This review is based on an advance copy of the book purchased during a lecture by the author in September. All images courtesy Scott Robertson and Design Studio Press
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