Brian Menze

That could be true as well. I didn't do the body, so it may have been a re-texture of some other character's torso. There are size variants and it's possible Nikko's head was put on the wrong body type. Or to take the blame, it may be my fault. It's possible I didn't double check my measurements.

It's easy to post pics after the game is out, not so easy while in production. Sometimes art can be a spoiler. Plus, the peolpe footing the bill like to be in control of what is reveled when. I'm comfortable putting these things up now, but it could've been a problem earlier. I'll post more if there is a topic I feel warrents it.

I'm the artist who modeled and textured you Nikko. It was fun actually. I knew when I saw your photo with those red cheeks that it'd be a challenge to fit you into the KOTOR world. Most faces made are fairly generic, so when you add a real likeness to them it can be a little jarring. I beleive some of the weirdness the model has is due to the slight fish eye lens the camera has in KOTOR2. It didn't look weird in Max.

Oh we all care, but this business keeps everyone pretty busy. Sometimes I have trouble just responding to emails muchless actively getting on a message board. I've just come back from vacation though, so I feel I have little more free time to chat here. haha, but I imagine that will change soon enough. Still, if there were more things for artists to comment on or discuss you'd find a few more of us up here. We (artists) simply assume you guys are much more interested in things other than what we do. I really get a kick out of seeing the fan art some of the people here have done, which appears in another thread. It's amazing too that there are custom legos, nihilus masks and people dressing up at conventions over something I was a part of. I've been doing this type of work for about 12 years and this kind of response is worth more than any pay raise my own company could provide.

Well, what I meant was that with all the high res images of my concepts floating around any of you could have put one of these fake action figures together. All the things needed to do it are available to everyone. So, anyone with Photoshop and some time could do it. See easy :D

Another thing I would have loved to have done is to have the cracked pieces of Sion's body continually shifting in and out away from his body to better give the impression that it is only his force power keeping himself together. But the engine just wouldn't allow for it.

It was pretty easy. I already had my concept paintings and the 3D models to pose. All I needed was the blister card art. I found that there are many SW action figure card templates on the internet. I downloaded one and it was simple cut and paste and that point. Still, I appreciate the kind words. I never get tired of kind words. At one point I wanted to model boxes and put vehicle labels on them to reproduce the early advertisements the first film had while I was growing up. Ya know the ones where it's a photo of a kid or two playing with the vehiles and figres? For whatever reason I thought it'd be pretty neat to have nostalgic KOTOR2 toy advertisements. I'm dumb.

Well, I only made three. Here is the last of the bunch.

How'd you know?

Getting capes to work correctly was near impossible so the cape idea was nixed early on. Plus, we wanted to be able to show off that his body was pretty jacked up. here are a couple of early thumbnails I did which later became the painting that was used for modeling.

I'm unable to say just yet. :ph34r:

Hey guys - This is the first time since I was in the middle of production on KOTOR2 to be checking up on the message boards. It's nice to see an art thread. Artists don't get on these boards much due to the lack of art topics. I thought I'd share this image I did early on KOTOR2 to try to get our LA producer to get some action figures made. I made a couple of others that I'll put up later. In the meantime keep the art coming. What I've seen here is great!

This painting was done by Chris Appelhans, a guy we contracted and used to to work with at Black Isle. He used Painter, but I don't know which version. Both Justin and Jason use Painter as well.

He wasn't patterned off of anyone.

If Chris Avellone had Ayn Rand in mind, he never mentioned it to me. I've never heard of her, so in now way was she inspiration on my end. Still, the images you've seen thus far of Atton, are a little on the "unfinished" side. Without going into it, Atton's face was having texture and character rigging problems. This, of course, will be fixed.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

keep an eye out! (I can't say more about it)

All of these are published in June's Electronic Games Monthly and Computer Gaming World.

uh.. maybe I was wrong?

All of the before mentioned worked on both the original and it's sequels.

It takes me longer than some. Sometimes I can take a whole work day to paint a concept and sometimes it only takes a couple of hours. It depends on a lot of things. My guidelines vary and typically come from the designers. Sometimes the designers have a clear idea what they want and sometimes they just need a guy who does "x" and I come up with a guy who looks like he does "x". Generally, it's 50/50 since the designers can only describe so much. It takes the person drawing it out to fill in the gaps and make the known factors aesthetically pleasing. Still, there are moments when I can sway them to something different from what they originally asked for, as long as my idea is sound and still fits his/her purpose in the story.

Well, the big head shots are, as I said before, magazine covers. Most of the other artwork you've seen are concepts. Almost all of the the npcs or main villains are painted the same way as the full body shot of the white haired chick on the Lucas Arts site. I tone it down a bit for creatures, townies and such. Also, Nearly every level concept is painted very nicely by Chris Applhauns or TJ Frame. As far as the gamespot article - I have no idea what they plan to do.

I'm not gonna spill this one

D'OH!

The two images that keep popping up (mask guy and white haired chick) are just for this very purpose. One appears on the cover of EGM and the other is on CGW.