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Deus Ex: Universe Art Dump Thread

Sehyron
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Hello Everyone!

 I am Hubert Corriveau, I am the Environment Director on Mankind Divided, and this is the Art Dump Thread for Mankind Divided.

We worked hard on this game for the last 4 years, we are proud of our achievement and we hope you liked the end result in the game.

In this thread we hope to post a bit of everything, Environment, Characters and Interactive assets, we have invited the artists to share their work with you in here, and hopefully you can appreciate the craftsmanship and love that went into each of those.

 As always, please keep in mind that most of these assets are the work of a team.  None of these would be possible without the excellent work of the Art Direction and the awesome concept artist team, who are tasked with dreaming and conceiving this world we are all building together. 

 Also, None of this is possible without the lighting artists who make these pop, and the team of Tech Artists and engineer who worked to make sure this could all be held together in-game.

We'll try to update this regularly.

Here is a link to each individual artists ArtStation.

Character Artist

Laura Gallagher: https://www.artstation.com/artist/lipstick

Jacque Choi: https://www.artstation.com/artist/jacque_choi

Marco Plouffe: https://www.artstation.com/artist/marcologue

Guillaume Tiberghien: https://www.artstation.com/artist/gtiber

Frederic D’Aoust: https://www.artstation.com/artist/fredericdaoust23

Eugene Fokin: https://www.artstation.com/artist/eof



Level Art

Thomas Rodrigue: https://www.artstation.com/artist/trodrigue
Michel Lanoie: https://www.artstation.com/artist/mlanoie
Maxime Chassé: https://www.artstation.com/artist/maxiimus  
David Chan: https://www.artstation.com/artist/davidchan


Interactive Assets

Frédéric Ferland Dorval : https://www.artstation.com/artist/freddykrug
Nicolas Belley:  https://www.artstation.com/artist/nicolasbelley


So here, welcome, and hope you like it!

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  • Sehyron
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    Sehyron triangle

    Level Art;  Prague

     This map here is the main map of the game, a Dense City-Hub.  The level art team was led by Jean-François Morier, and this map in particular was owned by Thomas Rodrigue.  Many artist worked on this, with credits going to Maxime Chassé, Alexandre Boucher, Simon-Pierre Boucher, Emi Takeshita, David Chan and a bit of polish by Michel Lanoie.   There are many subsection of Prague that were worked on by different artists, and we will present them in time. 



    Note the neat Parrallax Occlusion Mapping shader that was built for the street of prague.  This was mainly done in Mudbox.  It looks good also during the night time setting. It breaks apart in some place where it seams with its surrounding texture, but only rarely. I think for the most part, we succeeded in using POM without making it an eyesore.


    The Main difficulty of Prague, from a production point of view, is its density.  The map is filled with interior everywhere, and many subsection are there, loaded in memory, ready to access pretty quickly in the game.  But it’s rather small, this means that it is very dense data wise. You only have to do, maybe 20m before getting to a different point of interest. 

     A lot of assets are custom made for the storytelling required for a given space, this is extremely demanding on memory and some technical process, and therefore, our assets are always built with the highest memory efficiency possible in mind. 




  • lipstick
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    lipstick null
    My name is Laura Gallagher and I was one of the Lead Character Artists on DX:MD. It's my pleasure to showcase a small sample of the work done by the character art team during production. You'll find a lot more images on each artist's Artstation page in the original post of this thread.

    Marco Plouffe



    Jacque Choi



    Fred D'aoust



    Guillaume Tiberghien



    Eugene Fokin



    Laura Gallagher




    I speak for everyone on the team when I say how great an opportunity it was to work on Deus Ex. Thank you for your time, cheers!
  • jaker3278
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    jaker3278 polycounter lvl 8
    Great work, can i ask a question what programs do you use when creating the bio mechanical arms and augmentations? what is the work flow, i could guess but would probably be wrong.
  • FreddyKrug
    My name is Frédéric Ferland-Dorval and here is some of my work as an interactive objects artist on the game.













  • daniellooartist
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    daniellooartist polycounter lvl 11
    Such incredible work! This looks like engineering with a degree of practicality to it.
  • lipstick
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    lipstick null
    Hi Jaker, it's mostly Zbrush and 3ds max for the high res. Most of our artists have their own personal workflow and balance of zbrush/3ds max. We let everyone use the tools they prefer. Retopo was almost always in 3ds max but some used Topogun for a bit. Cheers!
  • Prime8
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    Prime8 interpolator
    Beautiful job! I love the style and execution.

    The only thing I dislike is the dotted pattern on some of the weapons, it promotes distortion in some areas and has a bit of a cheap plastic look to it. This is 100% nitpicking, the overall quality is just sooo high that this somehow stood out to me.
  • Sehyron
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    Sehyron triangle
    Feel free to give those feedback its good to read what polycounters think.

    For information.  Most assets are done with max, zbrush, a bit of mudbox.  Quixel suite for big assets texturing and obviously photoshop.  We scratched the surface of substance on a few things also. 
  • slosh
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    slosh hero character
    Gorgeous stuff guys...love those cars!
  • Sehyron
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    Sehyron triangle
    Fun fact about the cars.  We have to design them with the flatest nose possible for them to work with the cover rules of the game.  This is a rather difficult constraint to work with when the concept team design them.
  • pablohotsauce
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    pablohotsauce polycounter lvl 7
    I played through it, was really impressed by the enviros, and by the detail on the character models in closeup. My fav enviros: the Throat; the hallways and stairs of the upper-class apartments in Prague; and TF29 HQ. So beautiful. I was taking screenshots throughout the game.  :#

    Curious to see what the inside of a Palisade blade looks like in the DLC. I was wondering whether I'd get to explore one of those in the main quest, and I was sad that it didn't happen, haha. Could only look at it from afar...

    Very inspirational. :smile:
  • Rav3
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    Rav3 interpolator
    Great Work Guys! Outstanding job and gratz with game release!
  • Ged
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    Ged interpolator
    amazing work all round! been giving a lot of likes out on artstation to this stuff!
  • Elithenia
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    Elithenia polycounter
    Wow, gorgeous work! 
  • Jack M.
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    Jack M. interpolator
    Really amazing work! Can't wait to play through the game (loved Human Revolution).
  • sziada
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    sziada polycounter lvl 11
    Awesome work as always guys
  • lotet
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    lotet hero character
    Amazing work, love all the polygonal designs in the enemies. 
  • Norron
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    Norron polycounter lvl 13
    Awesome stuff! Really loved the level of detail on all the augmentations and character clothing.
  • gfelton
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    gfelton polycounter lvl 6
    That environment art is just unreal! Golem city really blew me away but everything was just so well done I'm not comfortable saying that one piece was better than an other. Really good stuff guys! :)
  • Ehren
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    Ehren polycounter lvl 9
  • Chantel-sky
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    Chantel-sky polycounter lvl 3
    I loved the environment so much, had a great atmosphere to it.
  • _Kratos_
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    _Kratos_ polycounter lvl 11
    Nice work guys!
  • erroldynamic
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    erroldynamic polycounter lvl 18
    Some really stellar work!
  • DBetts
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    DBetts polycounter lvl 5
    Beautiful work! I've spent more time than I should admit staring at zoomed in images, thank you for inspiring me to pick up 3DSmax and Zbrush again. How did you get the hair to look so great in sculpt? 
    It's interesting that gameplay directly constrained the design of cars yet I would never have noticed if you hadn't said it, are there any other examples of this I can be on the lookout for in game? 
  • elmamello
    This is seriously some of the most solid design I've ever seen. Amazing.
  • Nicorepe
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    Nicorepe polycounter lvl 4
    Puff amazing guys, loved the first one and still have to play this one. The color pallettes and lighting are amazing!
  • amirabd2130
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    amirabd2130 polycounter lvl 7
    great stuff. love the cars :+1:
  • Brian "Panda" Choi
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    Brian "Panda" Choi high dynamic range
    @lipstick
    What adjustments were made to the art direction for this sequel, coming from the general "Second Renaissance" in regards to character costumes in the first game?


  • lucashug
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    lucashug polycounter lvl 6
    Amazing work! Congratz!
  • The Rizzler
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    The Rizzler polycounter lvl 9
    Great world building in all aspects. Lighting was fantastic too! Brilliant work
  • Dash-POWER
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    Dash-POWER polycounter lvl 6
    Amazing work! BTW I found on some models weighted vertex normals technique. Maybe you used quadchamfer or any others script or it could be classic normals but it looks like more weighted.
  • Sehyron
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    Sehyron triangle
    HA HA!!!!   Very good question sir.  We actually use an in-house script that we lovingly call the Auto-Normaliser. 

    It actually breaks the vertex normal and manipulate them to our liking.  but the tool does more than that.  it remembers, forever, the selection of chamfer on a given assets,   then, you can add or subtract from that selection, and it keeps that selection alive no mater how we modify the mesh.  it's actually pretty good at keeping it coherent.

    then when comes time to process the normal, we "process" the chamfer with the tool.  In effect, it's the equivalent of if your were splitting the vertex normals 90 degrees (or N degrees) to be parallel with the largest hard surface adjacent to the pair of index of a given edge.  Those are always 2 edges chamfers by the way.

    Normally,  It can take a bit of time to do them manually, and especially to redo them after every fix we may do on an asset  (vertex normal can be tricky to keep clean). 

    The Auto-normaliser probably saved us a full man/year of production (at least, compared to how we didi this in Human Revolution).  As an example if you look at one of the car above, if we were to modify it, or build an lod, or...   really anything other than straight up collapsing it as an editable mesh (instead of editable poly),  you just process the chamfers and... about a minute later (the cars are heavy meshes to process), every vertex normal are split the way we want them.
    it's not "free" time wise, as you still need to define what is a chamfer or not, and what is a seamless smooth chamfer or a hard cut,   and it does add to the vertex cost in memory, but it fits our style.

    We could also map normal texture to simulate this but we are very tight in memory, so we would need to add extra cut in the mesh because there is no way we can map anything other than characters with a 0-1  unfolded texture map.
  • lipstick
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    lipstick null
    @DBetts You're probably referring to the hair Marco did. I saw him do it, it was wonderful :) He likes to break down his growth mesh in many polygroups. These are transfered automatically afterward to the fibermesh and they aid tremendously in selecting hair clumps for editing. 
    @Brian There's a definite inspiration from the medieval period this time around as it represented cold and dark times similar to the narrative setting. Gone are most of the warm and elegant costumes of HR as the golden period of mechanical augmentations has passed. My favorite character pieces representing this are certainly the many helmets and hats in game, their shapes and volumes are clear callbacks to darker times.

  • Prime8
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    Prime8 interpolator
    Sehyron said:
    HA HA!!!!   Very good question sir.  We actually use an in-house script that we lovingly call the Auto-Normaliser. 

    It actually breaks the vertex normal and manipulate them to our liking.  but the tool does more than that.  it remembers, forever, the selection of chamfer on a given assets,   then, you can add or subtract from that selection, and it keeps that selection alive no mater how we modify the mesh.  it's actually pretty good at keeping it coherent.

    then when comes time to process the normal, we "process" the chamfer with the tool.  In effect, it's the equivalent of if your were splitting the vertex normals 90 degrees (or N degrees) to be parallel with the largest hard surface adjacent to the pair of index of a given edge.  Those are always 2 edges chamfers by the way.

    Normally,  It can take a bit of time to do them manually, and especially to redo them after every fix we may do on an asset  (vertex normal can be tricky to keep clean). 

    The Auto-normaliser probably saved us a full man/year of production (at least, compared to how we didi this in Human Revolution).  As an example if you look at one of the car above, if we were to modify it, or build an lod, or...   really anything other than straight up collapsing it as an editable mesh (instead of editable poly),  you just process the chamfers and... about a minute later (the cars are heavy meshes to process), every vertex normal are split the way we want them.
    it's not "free" time wise, as you still need to define what is a chamfer or not, and what is a seamless smooth chamfer or a hard cut,   and it does add to the vertex cost in memory, but it fits our style.

    We could also map normal texture to simulate this but we are very tight in memory, so we would need to add extra cut in the mesh because there is no way we can map anything other than characters with a 0-1  unfolded texture map.
    Very interesting, thank you for sharing!
    I'm trying to finalise my own workflow for working with custom normals, so this is helpful. I'm at a point where I can edit just the base object, define chamfer weight, hard edges, UV seams etc. and have the chamfer and custom normals as modifiers. Though I'm not happy yet with the UV seams, they can get messy after chamfer applies.
    Got some (probably stupid) questions I like to ask, just to make sure I understand 100% correctly. 
    "2 edges chamfer" means your chamfer has 2 egdes in total? (minimum possible to chamfer something...).
    Do you add the UV seams afterwards or before you run the Auto-Normalizer?
    "...there is no way we can map anything other than characters with a 0-1  unfolded texture map" I understand you have overlapping UV islands for this kind pf asset, is that what you are saying here?
  • JacqueChoi
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    JacqueChoi polycounter
    Greentooth FTW!




  • Fazijinn
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    Fazijinn polycounter lvl 9
    amazing character models! you guys somehow did the impossible and made adam Jensen even more badass!
  • KurtR
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    KurtR polycounter lvl 7
    Greentooth FTW!


    I've finally found some time to start playing through the game, and I noticed the pin as well on the augmentation guy had a greentooth on it. Just loved it. And love the artwork in this thread. Thanks for sharing.


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