after an accidental find of a game artists portfolio a year ago i started collecting media from sw-games. because the lack of another project after prosecutor i looked around more and now have a large number of official screenshots, renders etc. from all major games and concept art from the movies.
now what to do with it?
id personally love to have a database with all possible media to preserve it as reference for future mods or just for inspiration since portfolio- and fansites can vanish quickly.
however i didnt see anything similiar anywhere so i assume people arent really interested and looking on wookiepedia plus a occasional gaming site is enough .

what is your viewpoint on this?

So i think what's there, what's missing. i play other games, view the Films, and get ideas. than i start an concept (map or mod or both) think if i can do this, and start. after finishing the project i may get some new ideas. there is nothing i collect for years

Personally there's no such thing as too many references. I must have searched for days, across countless sites, to get all the media I needed for my Battlefront 3 version of Mos Eisley. It wasn't "hard" just tedious.

This should be available in some format or another, if it's as extensive as I am guessing it is.

yeah, id like to know what you think about such a database and is "needed" rather than just nice to have.
i have around 6500 images from games and 1500 pieces of concept art from the movies. for less popular and more interesting games i saved as many screenshots as i found and for the others just a few promo screens, generally no selfmade screens of e.g. particular objects

I'm always interested in that kind of stuff. I don't know that it's something the general public/modding community needs, but it's something I'd love to have access to.

Eggman wrote:I'm always interested in that kind of stuff. I don't know that it's something the general public/modding community needs, but it's something I'd love to have access to.

I totally agree to this. I would definitely use it and it is probably a nice way to find idears to fill your maps.

I'm having modders block right now, I would absolutely love to have this!

Go for it!

I'd scan and upload the images from my Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts book, but it's against copyright law. The best you can do is gather what's already on the web.

Teancum wrote:The best you can do is gather what's already on the web.

He already did. He's asking if it would be a good idea to have a site to view all of these various collections of concept art and references.

As someone who deals with/creates web applications for a living I would say the best thing to do would be to link to images found on Google, and not upload the images to a given server. Lots of concept images on one server *might* cause copyright/fair use issues, whereas not hosting them is a way to get around it. For some reason individuals and companies are extremely protective of concept art.

thanks for the info! im pretty sure the concept art released for promotion that can be found on gaming sites is alright but i also have a lot of images from artists portfolios. i thought it would be better to upload the images rather than directlinking to prevent unnecessary bandwith usage of their sites. do you think it would be better not to upload?

If you have a free web host I don't see any issues. Otherwise just put all the files in a big zip file and upload it for people to download as a collection.

yeah, i thought about that but then again it would be one file thats uploaded here and downloaded a few time and thats it. id like to have a real database where more/better images could be uploaded but i guess that would be too much trouble with the portfolio pieces

I'm interested (i helped you a bit ) but the issue is copyright especially for portfolio stuff.

I'm always looking for references, so any solution you create is great!

I've got a fair amount of reference material on my photobucket page so I'd be interested in contributing.

cool! i read that photobucket supports group albums. i guess thats the best way to make a "public" collection. it doesnt seem to support image descriptions though
for the portfolio-stuff: would an upload be justified if the original sites are down and the picture isnt avaible anywhere?

edit:i started uploading images now, here is the group: http://gs37.photobucket.com/grouphome/T67YECJAXW/tags/
you have to use tags to "browse" because group albums dont support sub-albums.

Really cool, i really like photobucket, it's a good idea.