rmory studios

About rmory studios

Little something about us

We are a small conceptart company based in Bavaria, Southern Germany, in the foothills of the alps. Germany is known for its high tech armament solutions, so we thought we should bring that knowhow to the entertainment industry.

We are particularly proud of and known for our believable, functioning and appealing weapon designs. Most of our projects started with a request to do the weapon art for the client and evolved into doing gadgets, props and other designwork for their projects. With our art director being ex-military we also provide weapon consulting.

Most of our competitors just throw arround weapon parts and reassemble them to weapon designs that look good but would not work or are ergonomically wrong.
This fact damages the overall feeling and plausibility of every project, a fact mostly unknown to the clients.

We have set ourselves the goal to deliver awesome designs that would actually work and that, most importantly, feel real.

Projects

Showroom for our latest projects

Project: unanounced
Client: unanounced
What we did: Various concept art

Project: 2DArtist Issue 9/2012 www.3dtotal.com/...
Client: 3DTotal www.3dtotal.com
What we did: Assault Rifle with various attachments.

Project: Mindworld - Shattered Dreams
Client: RC Games
What we did: Design of the primary and only weapon used in the game, a gravity gun to interact with the game environment.

Project: Blacktank - working title www.blacktank.net
Client: -
What we did: Some conceptart for a design project set in a near future where a dubious corporation is seizing power.

Project: Mist of Stagnation www.mistofstagnation.com
Client: Osiris Studios www.osiris-studios.com
What we did: A Steampunk Game with focus on intense multiplayer action. We did the concepts for the weapons, some props and a mech.

Project: Xenonauts www.xenonauts.com
Client: Goldhawk Interactive www.goldhawkinteractive.com
What we did: Xenonauts is a singleplayer strategy game. Mankind versus extraterrestrial Invaders. We designed hundreds of weapons to fight back the alien threat.

Project: Gamer.nl article www.gamer.nl/...
Client: Gamer.nl www.gamer.nl
What we did: We provided educational artwork to illustrate an article about us.

Project: Miscellaneous
Client: Miscellaneous
What we did: Various conceptart we manufactured a while ago. We did not want you to miss some of the older stuff :)

What we do

Skills and services we offer

Here is a list of what we can do for you:

weapon design
gadget design
vehicle design
prop design
industrial design
character design
object design
enviroment design
set design
product design
creature design

Press

Articles about our work

KOTAKU
TOP STORIES / FINE ART

www.kotaku.com

These Men Design Video Game Guns for a Living
rmory Studios occupy a fascinating little niche in the video game concept art business: they specialise in the design of firearms. Based in Southern Germany, rmory is "particularly proud of and known for our believable, functioning and appealing weapon designs". While guns are the team's top priority, they also handle peripheral items like "gadgets" and "props". In addition to designing weapons themselves, rmory's art director is ex-military, so they do consulting on weapon design on the side as well. One project the team is currently involved with is indie X-Com homage Xenonauts. You can find a selection of their work above, while to see more, check out the team's site here.

GAMER.NL
ARTICLES / INTERVIEW

www.gamer.nl

Can you describe Rmory (how it started, who works there, where you work etc.)
It was summer 2009, a company from the UK had stumbled across some of my weapon designs on conceptart.org and wanted me to design their arsenal, this is how i got my first freelance concept art contract. But, Germany being Germany, one can't just start working - you need to pay taxes and in order to do that you need to register a company. That was when rmory studios was born. Back than I still worked at an advertising agency and rmory was only a sidejob. After a visit in the AAA game industry in 2010 over at your wonderful country, I came back home and started to work full time on rmory studios. At this point in time, rmory evolved into some kind of a family business as my brother helps me out from time to time, he is the handsome guy holding the guns on our website. Our office is based in Bavaria, southern Germany, in the foothills of the alps. Rmory studio's first goal is to deliver believable concept designs focusing on weaponry but also conventional concept art. I want to state here why it is so crucial to a game, especially shooters, to have a believable arsenal. What is on the screen at least 95% of your playtime when you play a shooter? What is your main tool of interacting with your environment? And without what would a shooter be useless? Exactly, guns, weapons and armament. A shooter stands and falls with the weapons it puts in the players hands, so they better be the most polished and most elaborate thing in the whole experience. That is what rmory studios offers its clients, elaborate weapon designs that look good and that would realy work.

What are you working on at the moment and what have you already done - project wise.
At the moment we work on two announced projects. There is the Steampunk Shooter "Mist of Stagnation" developed by Osiris Studios, a very ambitious project on which I designed all the guns the Player gets to wield as well as some props and a Player-controlled Steampunk mech. www.mistofstagation.com The second announced project is the long awaited return of a proper oldschool round based strategy game in which humankind kicks some evil alien butt. I am talking about XENONAUTS here, this is a favorite of mine as I was involved in the project from the get go. I basically concepted all the weapons for XENONAUTS, but I am also doing a lot of other stuff like the vehicles and their armaments, grenades etc too. I also did some ingame props, User Interface work and other things like UFO Interior design and so on. But you best check it out yourselves over at www.xenonauts.com, preorder it if you want to see my alien weapons in action ;) All the other projects can be found on www.rmory.net.

It's like a boys dream: designing weapons for games. Is it a boy's dream?
Well it looks like that for most people, indeed! But actually "designing" weapons as a boy and designing weapons as a grown-up are two completely different things. I started "designing" weapons with Lego bricks back in Kindergarden, as a young boy a weapon consists out of two parts, a grip and a barrel, you need something to hold it and something to point at your target, that's it. No design needed. As soon as you are grown up and get around to the real thing, everything changes. You start going to the shooting club, serve your time in the military and learn how guns work. After all that you don't look at guns the same way you did before. If you are still designing guns after that you will approach the subject more like an engineer. That is what happened to me. The real fascinating thing is that in some games it still seem to a be little boys who design the weapons, some "things" with grip and barrel, almost not identifiable as guns, but mowing down your enemies :) What I did not mention is the whole morality aspect behind the weapon issue. As a little boy you see them as toys, as a grown up you should not see them as toys anymore and you get into a conflict with your conscience designing them, but that would fill a book for itself.

How do you design your weapons (process, inspiration from games/real world)
This heavily depends on what the project is I am working on. When I design real world weapons I draw inspiration from my own experience with weapons, as I mentioned earlier I served in the military and was trained on several weapons, so I know my way around them and their ergonomics. This basically works for all projectile based weapons, scifi or fantasy. When it comes to non projectile weapons the thing is a little bit different, you have to imagine how for example a plasma rifle could work. You have to break it down to basics like ammo container, loading mechanism and discharging system and than arrange them in a manner that suits the user. The arrangement is than again based on my experience with real weapons. Realy challenging is the work on alien weapons. I designed all the alien weapons for Xenonauts and there you can not go ahead and do your thing as you would do with normal guns. You need to look at the anatomy of the aliens first and than create the weapons so they would be the most ergonomic for them to use. If you figured out how the weapon works you need to define where and in what operations it is used in order to chose proper materials and colors. After I figured that out, I start with some outline sketches. Then the most convincing one is taken to the next level. I put together a simplified workflow here:

As I said this is a simplified workflow and the real thing envolves a lot of more steps to get to the proper result.For a real contract the client also needs various perspective views of the gun, along with detail drawings of areas of interest, a proportion concept and so on. As you can see on our website we have even done real life photo sessions and merged highres renders with the photographs to get impressively realistic concepts. A buddy of mine who is a AAA veteran in the industry and makes ingame models of weapons just recently told me that my workflow would be very elaborate, as he is used to a "go to google images,copy and paste" workflow for the concepts he gets. He is right that this may be a bit more time-consuming, but the result speaks for itself, as the animators further down the pipeline are not having a hard time figuring out how the moving parts work. So in the end you will save time when your initial concept is properly thought out.

What's your favorite weapon to design and why?
That would be a near future projectile based assault rifle. I just love reshaping and tweaking todays designs to enhance them and give them a different look.

Which weapon is overrated in games and why?
That is a realy interesting question, the most overrated weapon in my opinion is every weapon that is fired in rapid fire mode. You just run around spraying bullets. Nobody would do that in real life, you are wasting tons of ammo and would not be able to aim properly. The most horrible thing in shooters is when they give you the option to switch to semi but you do not have an advantage in doing it, so after the third enemy you will switch back to full-auto. That is too hollywood in my opinion.

Which parts are difficult when you're designing weapons? What are the pitfalls?
Pitfalls are everywhere when you want to deliver a believable weapon design. I put together a slightly exaggerated example that shows some basic mistakes in weapon design crammed together in one rifle.

At a first glimpse the design doesn't look that bad, but if you realy take a good look you are going to see anything but a believable rifle concept. A lot of todays games weapons have flaws like described in the image because their concept artists rely too much on the copy and paste technique i mentioned earlier. If you use that technique you need to be quite sure about what you are putting where. If you are not sure the shell ejection window ends up in a wrong spot or is left out completely. I even saw a concept where the gun had two pasted ejection windows. I could name you at least four major franchises off the top of my head that have weapons that have these kinds of mistakes.

I saw the steampunk interpretation on your website. Is that kind of work (more creativity) also more fun than 'normal weapons'?
It is different rather than more fun. It gives me the opportunity to use materials and shapes that you normally don't use. It is also not so serious, the whole weapon design thing gets easier when it is put into a totally imaginative realm like steampunk. It is like creating something for a Jules Verne adventure, where you know it is just for entertainment and simply art. Real world weapons always have this threatening tone to them. In one sentence I would love to hang any of my steampunk guns above my fireplace, but I don't want to hang a scifi assault rifle there.

If you could have one of your designed weapons in real life, which one would it be and why?
Hmmm that is a tough one, i actually want all of them :) , but if I realy had to choose I guess it would be the plasma assault rifle I did for Xenonauts. It is one of my earlier designs, but I simply love it. It combines a future ammo type with the solid chassis of an assault rifle. It looks scifi but feels also familiar in a way that you could pick it up and know how to handle it without needing a holodeck tutorial. We actually wanted to reveal the more advanced weapons in Xenonauts later on this year, but you get a first glimpse on it exclusively for this interview.

Interested?

Drop us a line if you consider working with us.

Rotkreuzstr. 1
87740 Buxheim
Bavaria
Germany
(+49) 152 53 67 67 66
info@rmory.net
www.rmory.net

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