Brian Menze

You're MY lead programmer

no.

True , I am a sneaker freak and I wanted MT to be one too!

Aaron did paint it. No copy and pasting there. He's also responsible for my avatar.

Tapper is the name of an old video game where the object is to fill beer mugs for customers. Great game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapper The Moogle is from Final Fantasy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moogle

Sadly, I'm probably the only artist to check this thread and the only one who didn't work on NWN2. I'll pass on your kind words though.

The challenge is the topic put forth to each artist, we are not challenging each other. There is no contest and no prize to be won.

Many of the artists, as you know, do not frequent the message baords which makes many of the comments here unread by the art folks at Obsidian. So if you'd be so kind to please take a moment to make a comment on the blog page, as well as here on the message boards, I'm sure our artists would love to read what you have to say. Thanks so much!!

Obsidian has four full time concept artists and a handful of others very capable of doing conceptual work. Others still like to draw a bit as well, even if their regular work doesn't require them to.

This is by far my proudest moment. When I created this character with Avellone I mentioned to him that we will know we have made great characters when we begin to see people dressed up as characters from KOTORII at conventions. This however beats them all. With all sincerity - thank you, Lord Mayyn, you have made my day.

Yep, it was worth it...and then some.

hahaha I love the date stamp.

I did use Painter, but I didn't use a custom palette. I just picked color by eye. unless you were limited to a number of colors, why would anyone use a custom pallette?

The fighters are nearly placed one for one from the original.

It's margins are wider than usual because it was for a magazine. They need a lot of bleed in order to have more freedom in laying out the cover. When cropped it has a much better compostion and in my opinion sits well with the amount of characters present.

Well, to perhaps inspire you further...I've attached the the cover I did for "Tips & Tricks" without any of the type covering it. The art director at the magazine requested that I incorporate the KOTOR2 characters into the origianl movie poster for Star Wars. It seemed easy enough, but it proved to be a challenge in the end. I had a little help from David Espinoza who rendered out the ships for me and I placed them in one at a time to create the same pattern the the original poster had. The director also asked that the Luke spot be filled with one of the optional player heads, so I chose the head that looked like a typical jedi from the newer films. I'll ask the powers that be if I can post the image as a desktop for download. I set one up in a horizontal format for desktop use internally, so it should just be a matter of finding a spot for it here somewhere. But we'll see.

Wonder how many people will take this as confirmation that Obsidian are working on K3? Simply, they'd be wrong to do so.

So far, yes. I can't go into why, but "difficult" would be the nice way of saying it. But when things work out the reward is greater. Especially for me. Looking back though, KOTOR2 was one of the most painless projects I've worked on. It seemed like we just sailed throughh it. Even when there bumps, they seemed minor, at least from my perspective. Others on the team may say differently, I don't know. For me though, it was a great time and possibly one my top three projects to have ever been a part of.

Its okay Brian, everyone makes mistakes. Perhaps if you get to work on Kotor III you will do good, or better. Even if Obsidian were to work on KOTOR3 I could not be a part of it because production would start up right in the middle of my current gig. PNJ will keep me busy for a while.

Well, yes that would annoy me, normally. That particular situation though was a little different in that I moved on to something else. Still, those types of things are part of the job really. I'm at the conceptual level, so many of my ideas are squashed. I'm still learning how to deal with it. Sometimes I get really angry and find myself arguing emotionally instead of rationally. I love my job and the people I work with though, even the people who make my days hell. To keep this on topic - I remember Sion being the most difficult character to hammer out. Avellone is sometimes very particular and in the case of Sion, it seemed as though I just couldn't bring forth the look and appeal Chris wanted. The caped Sion is someone else's attempt because I was running out of ideas. We ended up going with my initial idea, but I think Avellone and I both felt we didn't quite get him right and having to resort to an idea that you know isn't great is a terrible feeling. On the flip side I think I nailed Nihilus right away. So well infact, that he became an icon for the game. So I have to mentally latch on to those days to get me through te bad ones.

If it got so bad that I was getting that many from you, I might have your emails dumped in junk mail, but I wouldn't sue you. :D

Are you saying I would sue you for emailing me? Why would I do that?

What I can do, is to post more KOTOR2 images. I don't think there was an uncluttered version of the "tips and Tricks" cover I did. I can post that when I get back into work on Monday.

what little I did for NWN2 is not being used. They sort of went in a slightly different direction as I was being put onto something else. Plus, I was on NWN2 for a very short time, so I don't feel comfortable meddling in the NWN2 boards since I'm not part of that team. What I'm currently doing is under wraps and anything I would post would surely be a lawsuit.

I want you all to know I'm keeping a folder of all your work. It gives me great joy that these characters mean enough to you to spend your time outside of the game with them and It's a lot of fun to see the different takes on our cast. Keep them coming - you're all doing good stuff.