One of our additional assigned tasks for 3D Art this semester was to create three pieces of concept art for our capstone games—not necessarily for hero assets; any small prop or piece of set dressing would do. For Husk Planet, I did the concepts for the Fire Ascended, the digital notebook, and the water bottle.
This week I was able to retopologize the revolver, UV unwrap it, and do a first pass of textures. I'm not satisfied with how the metal turned out and I'd like to rework it; it occurred to me after I had already rendered everything that Wayfinder may not even use metallic parameters in their renders at all, or have reduced its intensity. I also need to add stronger handpainted details, as these textures are entirely procedural, but I was able to research a couple of solid workflows for how to accomplish this. I'm hoping I can eventually revisit this project and do it more justice.
This is the baseline workflow we're going to use to attempt to emulate the texturing style of Hyper Light Breaker. To start, I highly recommend paying close attention to these breakdowns from John DeRiggi, the lead character artist who worked on that game:
You can find his post with the game's visual pillars here. His Artstation account is here, and there are two other artists here and here who worked on that game and have posted their work.
Base Colors
Start in Substance Painter with your game-res model. Make a series of fill layers for your base colors; I only have one in this scene for this demonstration, but you'll need base layers for all the different parts. Establish Roughness and Metallic values as needed. Right-click and add a mask to every base layer except the bottom one, then add a paint layer to that mask and either paint white or black to include or exclude that layer's information from part of the model.
There are a couple of ways to make this easier:
After applying the base colors, add a subtle gradient from the bottom. This is a common technique to draw the eye toward the important parts of the model. (For a character, this is the upper body toward the head, so I applied this gradient to the legs, feet, and lower torso.) To do this, create a fill layer and make the color a desaturated light purple and set the layer's blending mode to Multiply; this allows the gradient to be uniform across surfaces with multiple colors and makes it easier to change its color. Right-click and apply a black mask, then, with the mask selected, right-click again and apply a paint layer. In that paint layer, paint with white to gently bring the gradient in using a soft brush. (I typically use Smooth Noisy because it has a very low Flow value by default and is pretty straightforward to work with.)
Procedural Brush Strokes
Now we add procedural brush strokes. Create a fill layer and make it a color that's similar to but still clearly distinct from the base color. (This model is meant to be a burnt corpse, so I made mine a dark brownish red, lighter and more saturated than the base—take a look at the references we have of Hyper Light Breaker to get an idea!) Right-click to apply a black mask, and then with the mask selected, right-click and apply a fill layer.
In the Properties menu there should be a button that says grayscale. Go to your Assets window and find the Cells 4 texture (either just search for it or filter for textures). Click and drag that texture onto the grayscale button, and now your layer is masked according to that texture map. (Set the Projection to Tri-planar projection to make it project seamlessly onto the model.) You can see my settings adjusting for scale to get the look we're trying to go for, but every model will be different, so these settings are always subject to adjustment as needed.
These brush strokes, however, can't be the perfect geometric shapes of the Cells 4 texture; they're meant to look more organic. To achieve this quickly and simply, right-click with your mask selected and add a filter layer. Click the filter button and select the Blur Slope filter; this filter is commonly used to quickly achieve a more painterly look. I have it set to the default, but don't be afraid to play around with it.
Duplicate the layers and add different color variations to your model; I added a couple of different, darker shades of brown. In the Cells 4 layer under Properties > Parameters > Seed, I clicked Random to shift around the location of the splotches.
Painted Brush Strokes
This is where we're going to start painting in our highlights and shadows, and this is where baking becomes important; you'll need to have access to the high-resolution version of this mesh. Baking is its own beast and I'm not going to get into it right now, but you do at least need to have baked an ambient occlusion map.
Create a new fill layer with your shadow color using the same purple > multiply method we did for the gradient. This time it's not going to be subtle, so feel free to change around the tone and the exact hue of the color. (A more blueish-purple will give you cooler shadows, and a reddish-purple will give you warmer shadows, so be mindful.) Set the shadow's Roughness value all the way up—you're trying to call attention away from the areas in shadow, so they shouldn't be catching light.
Right click and add a black mask, then with the mask selected, right click and add a generator. Click the button that says generator, then select Ambient Occlusion from the list of options, and it will generate a mask based on the ambient occlusion map you baked in Substance's native baking program. Now ambient occlusion maps are black in places that are in shadow and white in places that are not, but we're trying to emphasize the shadows, so they need to be masked in, not out. With the Ambient Occlusion layer selected, go to Properties > Parameters and change Global Invert to be True.
The ambient occlusion map isn't going to be perfect; there may be unavoidable baking errors simply due to what the model is like, or it's simply not emphasizing every shadow the way you'd like. With the layer mask selected, right click and add a paint layer, then go in and manually touch up where you're seeing errors or add and emphasize shadows where you think they aren't strong enough. This is the part of the process where your artistic eye matters!
(It should be noted that with as simplistic a modeling style as we've chosen, there won't necessarily be the same kind of ambient shadows as the team on Hyper Light Breaker was getting. That doesn't mean there won't be any, just that the vibe is a little different.)
If the shadows aren't intense enough, you can always darken the color. I would also turn symmetry on and use that where you can when you start out on the hand painting; it's less tedious to have ground covered on both sides, but you don't necessarily want it to be perfectly symmetrical all the way around.
Lastly, we're going to paint in highlights, and this is a similar process to the shadows. Make a new fill layer with your preferred highlight color; here I've chosen a color only a bit lighter than my base. Don't lower the roughness too much compared to your base layer, but lower it enough that there's some specular variation; since this is for highlights, we want the light to catch them just enough to draw attention to where we want the eye to go and look interesting. Add a black mask, then add a generator, then click on the generator button and select Curvature from the options.
The curvature map is a grayscale map as opposed to a purely black and white map like the ambient occlusion, but what it does is highlight edges and darken cavities depending on your settings, and that makes your textures more eye-catching and helps emphasize your silhouette. Unfortunately, because it's grayscale it needs a heavier hand to help make it effective as a mask, because the grays will still make that highlight color poke through where it shouldn't. Under Properties > Curvature, you can play around with the settings as I've done here to push back some of that information and leave only the highlight detail. It's still procedural, so it's not perfect, but it helps alleviate the worst. Additionally, lower the opacity of the Curvature generator—Hyper Light Breaker doesn't have particularly strong edge highlights, instead relying on rim lights, but we do need to have a foundation to work with as we add in the painted detail.
Lastly, we'll need to paint in highlighted areas and mask out areas that shouldn't be lit. Like with the gradient, this is about leading the eye to places of interest; on a character, this is typically the head and the hands, and on this character in particular we also want to highlight the horn-like growths from its body. Use a soft, low opacity brush to do this so as not to overpower the paint strokes.
That should be the information everyone needs to at least get started on textures!
This week I continued my work on the revolver I started over winter break. My goal was to finish the sculpt and retopology; I wasn't able to complete the retop, but I did start on it, and I was at least able to finish the sculpt to reasonable satisfaction.
I have a complicated relationship with commercialism.
I don’t reject it out of hand. Art is a form of communication meant to express ideas, and if an idea is worth expressing on a large scale, it needs to appeal to as many people as possible. For the artist, it’s gratifying to have a wide audience enjoy and appreciate their work (and, naturally, to be able to support themselves). The problem is that many ideas worth expressing on a large scale—the aspects of the human experience that are unlikeable and even ugly—aren’t particularly appealing or enjoyable, and the solution is typically to avoid them or sand them down, which doesn't actually solve the problem. And, whether I was asked to or not, that’s where I come in.
My life has been defined by uphill battles and strong stances and the constant tempering of nuance, and I think that’s reflected in what I gravitate toward artistically. I prefer silhouettes and sculpts that are clear and readable, yet made organic with edgewear and weathering. I draw from color palettes that are vibrant, but not lurid, and am interested in emboldening the color schemes that occur in landscapes and the natural world. I’m intentional about designing characters with diverse face shapes and body types, particularly female characters, but this also requires being intentional about avoiding stereotypes and caricatures. I make it a point, when analyzing or discussing a work of art, to examine those elements that are controversial or difficult to understand, and appreciate and praise moments of complication and conflict. In short, I like to dig into a mess, engage with what makes it interesting, and communicate it in an appealing way.
No work of art has been or will be able to perfectly express the ways that people hurt each other or themselves, or how endings aren’t always happy, in a way that every single person in its audience will understand or appreciate. But these ideas must be expressed. If people are to become invested in making the world better for each other, they have to be able to truly see each other, to gain greater empathy and understanding for the world as it is rather than what they might like it to be. It's a thankless job to attempt to find precisely the right balance between mass appeal and expressing an unpleasant truth. It will always be difficult to make the case for art to be a window rather than a mirror.
But hey—I like a challenge.
Projecting Out Past Graduation
This next 3D Art project is going to be a bit more self-directed, and we were given the creative freedom to choose any project we wanted to work on. I decided to continue working on the revolver I started over winter break, and this week I spent my time working on the alphas for the filigree and researching how to apply them to the sculpt. I was directed to a tutorial by Michael Vicente on how to apply an engraving- or carving-like alpha, and I also took a look at how to properly set up and apply alphas and avoid heavy falloff. (I also added the scope at the front of the barrel, which was missing in my previous submission.)
This was the final assignment for our project to model, sculpt, and texture a head for a character who will appear in our capstone games. I reworked the tertiary details from the previous week to bring them more into the actual style of the game I'm working on, and paid closer attention to the texturing style we're emulating (Hyper Light Breaker, which has a lot of patches of color over surface reminiscent of watercolors). I'm still experiencing baking issues with the seams of the model and hope to figure out a workaround, but overall I'm pleased with the result of the actual texturing maps.
Y'know, a lot of WrapMode tiles have been made in this world, and these are certainly three of them.
