Free Art Tool Released Thanks to Epic Friday

At Epic, we have a fun monthly tradition known as Epic Friday, which gives employees a break from ongoing tasks and provides a platform for us to work on pet projects. One day each month, we’re encouraged to be creative and productive solely within the context of “making cool stuff” that benefits our games and technology development process.

Epic Games Senior Environment Artist Warren Marshall recently set out to refine his manual drawing skills. While Warren is both highly technical and artistic, he felt the need to revisit the basics and learn more about perspective.

“Gotta grind those fundamentals,” he said. Voicing how making perspective grids by hand can be frustrating, he continued, “The programmer in me wanted to do something cooler. Enter Epic Friday!”

Warren describes the app he developed, Carapace, as “a simple program that lets you place vanishing points around an image placeholder to flesh out the shell of your drawing. Shell, carapace… Get it?”

Carapace enables users to place up to nine vanishing points or as few as one. One-, two and three-point perspective grids are possible along with some extras to accommodate any weird angles in a scene.

Here’s a video of Warren setting up a simple three-point grid:

• Once the grid is in place, click CTRL+C and to place the grid on the clipboard.
• Paste it into Photoshop and use it as a guide!

“Carapace can also determine the perspective of existing images,” said Warren. “Say you have a piece of concept art that you want to paint over or add something to it. If you can’t work out the perspective, you can use this program to load the image and lay down trace lines. With two trace lines on the screen, hitting a hot key will place a vanishing point at the intersection spot. This saves you trying to figure out where to place the vanishing points by clicking and dragging and guessing.”

See it in action again here:

Today, we’re very pleased to share Warren’s clever app with the community.

Download Carapace here for free!

* Requires .NET 4.0        

Have questions or feedback? Check out this thread on the Epic Games Forum.