The Video Game Artist
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Painters approach their subjects with tools in hand, perhaps starting with a sketch or a values study, then moving to paper or canvas with watercolor, paint or pastels. From that process, a landscape, a bar or some cows and horses are born.
Jack Frankenberry approaches his subjects differently. As an animator and 3D modeler, he creates art for video games. This is how he described his creation of a half-timbered cottage.
“I sculpted out modular wall and roof pieces in Zbrush, made low-poly game models in Maya, textures with Substance Painter, and then brought them all into my world with the Unity Engine,” he said.
As a video-game designer, bringing a horse to life might mean turning to Blender – a 3D creation suite for animation – “which I am turning to more and more these days,” he said. “I sculpted the horse in Zbrush and made the game model in Maya, and textured it in Adobe Substance 3-D Painter.”
He grew up in Milwaukee playing video games. In his 20s, he started learning how to make models.
“It was simple stuff and it was fun, and I started to realize I could make models and sell them through an online marketplace,” he said. “I started making a few dollars, and then a couple of hundred bucks. I realized I could make a living just making video game models and selling them. And I also started making courses – over 40 or 50 hours of online videos teaching people how to do this stuff, too – making anything from buildings and environments to characters, outfits and weapons. Just pretty much anything.”
ArtStation carries some of his work for sale – modular castle pieces, a windbreaker, boots, a male model, a suit of armor, full heads, skulls, trousers – items that developers can buy and use in their own video games.
He’s also developing his own game through a grant he received from a nonprofit foundation in Zurich, Switzerland, DFINITY. The game will run on a blockchain and control what actors can do through smart contracts
“It’s a multiplayer game that you can play with other people, and every move you make in the game will be checked by smart contracts, and it has the security of the blockchain,” he said.
A blockchain is “a digital database that can be used simultaneously and shared within a large decentralized, publicly accessible network” – the technology at the heart of bitcoin and other virtual currencies. Smart contracts are used in finance, often to automate actions like margin calls – if the value of your investment falls below a specified point, a smart contract can call for more margin or simply take it from a linked account with no need for a broker to get on the phone.
The “currency” for blockchains in the gaming world are different, of course, and smart contracts are more complex.
“It is much harder to define a smart contract in a game than in finance,” Frankenberry said. “Here, a smart contract might say your character can’t run through walls.”
“Every interaction between players, or every movement, or every time you attack a player, it will check to make sure that that’s acceptable,” he continued. “So this makes it all a lot more fair. If it works, it could completely revolutionize video games. You can’t cheat on it.”
These days, he’s using Adobe Substance 3-D Painter to create a world with trees, water and clouds, and starting to design cities.
“I really had to go and learn where the muscles and the bones are, learn the proportions and sculpt it out,” he said. “It’s like sculpting and painting, and this is what I’ve been doing for over 10 years.”
Frankenberry went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he majored in political science. After graduation, he enrolled in film school at UW-Madison, but wound up in video-game design when he realized it was something he could do anywhere and work at his own pace, collaborating with other artists from all over the world.
His partner in game development is a Bulgarian who lives in Greece. They have known each other for 15 years but have never met in person. The game they’re designing will “run through a website so anyone can play it from wherever they can access a website,” he said. “You don’t have to download anything.”
The game combines sci-fi and medieval elements set in the post-apocalyptic future.
“You’re playing as a character that will develop as you play,” he said.
They plan to release it when it’s about 40-percent complete and will seek some press and promotion through DFINITY, and in the games community.
“It’s to showcase what we were able to do,” he said. “I’m hoping it will be fun and people will want to play it. We have seen a lot of interest from other designers, programmers and developers who want to get involved. And we have some interest from venture capitalists and investors who are ready to get behind it. We are going to release it to demonstrate what can be done and then get people excited and keep developing to a more in-depth game on a much bigger scale. Then depending on how much money we can raise, we will look at hiring people.”
Frankenberry is married to the artist, Meg Lionel Murphy. They have a shop and gallery on Maple Street in Sturgeon Bay called The Hours, which is open weekends and by appointment using DM on Instagram @thehoursgallery. The two of them met during the early stages of the pandemic while he was living in Milwaukee and she was in Door County.
