it is all 2d planes arranged in 3d space, even the characters are all spritesheets. so ingame nothing is 3d at all.
small fun fact about the 3d characters, and my saying about 2d is king.
Here is the mesh of Gumo, with a modelled in Mouth that never was used ingame, i just found out about this a few days back, i was just thinking someone from the animators removed the mouth i modelled, but no you really just don't see it, so why bother?
eyes and mouth are just layed over like in windwaker, in most animations even just floating in front of the mesh, not being wrapped around at all.
depthwise we had a custom fog solution with colors (transparency and value) we could blend in over depth. And Depth of Field obviously, which can also be controlled over a custom curve so it is not just linear.
I watched a streamer play through this game because I'm not in a position to buy stuff right now and WOW, it hit me right in the feels and was beautiful, really recommend for anyone. The art is so nice!
My first assignement back in may 2014 when I joined MoonStudios was to polish up Mount Horu. Mount Horu was still in a pretty rough spot in most places and was still under construction. The scenes alignement was 100% different the first time I saw it. The way the levels are organized now was a good decision made back then, it was a weird maze before.
The first task was to envision and create a new entrance for Horu. The old one we had was too small and un-epic for Thomas, it had to be more grand and worthy of the last part of a game.
This was the first thing I painted for MoonStudios and I kinda overdid it a bit. But at least I had a good idea of what its supposed to look like afterwards. It took me 2 or 3 days with some iterations to paint. It was my first concept and I didn't know that it is enough to really make a small sketch and then go into the editor and flesh it out there. But it also helped quite a lot to paint so much, because I thus had a good start for new assets. Horu hadn't had any architecture to speak of, so I had to paint a lot of that anyways. A lot of what has been painted for this section was later used in all scenes of Mount Horu. Here is an assetsheet for all assets I painted.
Assetcreation and -integration was really straight forward. All graphics are *.png and were painted in Photoshop and saved into their respective folders. Unity loaded them automatically and a double click brought them into the gameworld. Refresh colliders and you were good to go for testing.
The entrance scene wasn't completely blank, but I was supposed to find a different solution and I could kinda do what I wanted. Gamedesign told me to not make it boring and have a few jump sections in there, but apart from that, this wasn't a gameplay focused section.
The door had to be able to be opened, so I also made a concept for a small sequence there. David put it in game and well, see it ingame. Here is only a small screenshot from it opening. I think it was Max who added some more flames to it. I like it!
My next big task and that was a 3 weeks big task was to setdress and polish the hub you enter right behind the entrance gate. But I didn't have to do this alone. Kaja and I started simultanously on duplicates of the scene to setdress the black blockout. Its easy to bring stuff back together later in Unity. It took a lot of time and I think this is one of the biggest rooms in the game.
This is rougly the blockout from which Kaja and I started to work off of. Every room in the game started with a layout like this. That proved to be the easiest way for the game designers to work on the levels. It then provides the artists with everything they need to work from.
After finishing the first dressing part we had to think about how to design the different doors. The triangle shape of all doors and as a general art direction guideline was something Johannes and Max came up with in the first stages of Mount Horu concepting. Kaja and I took that idea and tried to integrate it into each door in a slightly different way.
Mount Horu is a very very old mountain. Its been there for aeons and hasn't been active for a very long time. Ancient creatures and civilizations used to worship to their gods. Johannes and Max wanted to show this with old carvings, images of old creatures and gods and giving the whole scenery a temple-like ambience. But with Mount Horu errupting and spitting fire most of the structures crumbled and the architecture lies in ruins. Its glory shattered by the strength and rage of the mountain.
Each side of the hub area has four rooms. We tried to make them as distinct and individual as possible with each one having its own theme. One is a spiky hellhole of death and dispear, others are more architectually driven.
Unfortunately there are no real steps of any of our rooms. We were kind of too busy to care about keeping steps. But well, at least we do have the state it is in now, so here you go:
Love the work you guys did on this!!! So beautiful and inspiring. Absolutely love it! Playing through it right now, and enjoying it immensely. SO GOOD!
Oh man. Mount Horu was great! absolutely loved it. Though, I did the bottom left cave before the bottom right cave, so it felt like there wasnt a climax for me, since I
ran from the wave of fire first
.
Im curious. How did you guys do the alignment of ori. As he runs along the ground, he changes the angle depending on the ground itself, rather than just moving up and down, the sprites always facing the same way. Curious how that was done.
Mt Horu was legit, man. Loved it to pieces.
I want to pick your brain a bit about the blockout. Clearly this was what you were given by the devs, but I want to know if it was just a texture/image they gave you, or if they used primitives or something similar with collision to make the scene when they gave it to you? I ask, because I want to block out a level in 2d in an effective way, and I just want to know how they did it. It looked like it enabled you guys to produce art for it very fast.
Also, did you use expressly the collision that came from the primitives, or did you use the collision generated from your sprites when it came to gameplay?
Thanks everybody for the kind words! @slipsius:
There is no right way or order to play Horu, do as you wish. Every Room is a trial in itself.
@makkon
The blockout you see in the image is in editor. The blockout is done via a modified plane tool with which you can easily block out shapes and roomstructures. So its basically a 3D tool, but its really just a plane.
I don't think that the blockout enabled us to go in with art faster, but... well, it did. If we only had an image of what the level would be we would have many iterations and errors in translation I guess. So yea, it kinda did - compared with an image based blockout.
Colliders are created through a combination of artwork and the blockout, but there also are scenes without blockout at all, so colliders can also work with art only too. And they mostly do.
just wow... looked through this multiple times and still im finding more and more elements to stare at in this, thanks so much for sharing this, straight to the inspiration bank!
@Makkon:
I actually have no idea! I've seen 2 different kinds of those tools, so I guess one is Unity one is ours?
I really don't know. Ask our techies!
It is a custom made polygontool, and a lot of the game was blocked and playable really early on. obviously stuff changed and blockouts became MUCH more organic with time. the original blockouts have been pretty conservative 90°. it took a bit to get everyone to break this tilebased mindset.
i think this was probably my biggest contribution to the game, pushing Max in the very early days to break the angular blockouts, making everything much more organic.
I have to say, the work poured into Ori is absolutely phenomenal - a stand-out, incredibly well executed piece in a pretty overflowing platformer genre. I'm already contemplating a second play-through for a 100% run and enjoy the whole thing again, but the first time hopping through the forest, my mind was just continually boggled by the overwhelming amount of 2D art I was seeing in sometimes only fleeting moments of this game.
I think one of my favorite aspects has to be the sprawling background and near-foreground artwork that is layered to create parallax. It's a bit hard to pick up on all that subtle awesomeness with just the still images in this thread, but it really was some of the little things about Ori that just blew me away.
Well done all! I will be very interested to see what Moon Studios presents next...and if you guys need more modelers.
I like this video Steffen put together - It's a WIP, but I think it's cool enough to share it. It definitely shows how many elements our artists needed to paint to put together a single screen for Ori. That damn game is full of art. Full of it!
And yeah, as you can see, we didn't go for the 'paint 1 texture and tile it across the ground' thing, cause I can spot that kind of thing from a mile away and it always feels kinda cheap. Instead, we had tons of textures and made sure we could put them next to one another without any ugly seams, etc.
I love how beautifully coloured things are, especially with the lights. I find that often with 2D games, either the lighting isn't dynamic, or the painted assets have very ambiguous (ambient) light direction.
From the breakdown it looks as if you did paint light direction into your assets, and if you wanted to control it you covered it with another layer of transparency, either dimming things down or adding another coloured highlight. Is that right? (Uber overdraw?)
Hi all
I am in love with this game. It's one of the best I have ever played and I really hope we will see more of Nibel. Congratulations to Thomas and all the people at Moon Studios and of course Airborn Studios. You all have done exceptional work.
And thank you very much for sharing with us all those assets and information. It's great reading the posts.
I gushed in the other thread already, but It bears repeating -- Ori has to be one of the most beautiful and immersive experiences I've had with games in years. On par with Journey, but far better in the mechanics department
Is there anyone on the tech side that would be able to break down how your team handled depth of field? I assume you're using a custom setup that didn't make use of Unity's DOF image effect, but would you be willing to share details? Very interested in this, as I'm trying to help solve the issue for a project built in a pretty similar way to Ori.
wow - thanks for the huge and detailed art dump. it is great what you have achieved - totally dig the look.
i have to spend some time to take a closer look on all the stuff and read the infos.
too bad ori is for the xbox
Awesome stuff! Really love the art and the direction of the game. It's crazy to think how much work had to be created for the game.
I have a few questions about the art: How did the artists decide what and how many piece variations they need? Looking at Simon's Mount Horu assets, I don't understand why you need the long railing instead of just combining 3 of the short railing. Was there a specific art direction or a technical limitations for creating the asseets? How did you keep the transitions between assets smooth? Was the animations of the assets done in Unity?
There's not enough words to express how much I have loved this game! The art is phenomenal!! Everything about this game has amazed me. The art, game play, characters, animation, MUSIC, and well......everything! You guys are the inspiration that pushes me to be better at what I do, and for that I thank you.
Thank you to everyone who worked on this game, and thank you for the art dump. I wish nothing but the best for the future of ya'lls company
Awesome stuff! Really love the art and the direction of the game. It's crazy to think how much work had to be created for the game.
I have a few questions about the art: How did the artists decide what and how many piece variations they need? Looking at Simon's Mount Horu assets, I don't understand why you need the long railing instead of just combining 3 of the short railing. Was there a specific art direction or a technical limitations for creating the asseets? How did you keep the transitions between assets smooth? Was the animations of the assets done in Unity?
Hm, I don't know about the environment, because I haven't painted those, but I always did around 3 to 5 variations. That just felt like the right amount of variation in order to hide repetition. There weren't really any limitations for creating assets, as they are really nothing else then *.pngs. Well, thats the limitation right there, they had to be *.pngs. But that allows for kinda everything we wanted to do. Further adjustments could all be made in Unity via our tools.
Most of our assets blend into transparency where they are supposed to transition, but we could also add masks ourselfs in Unity.
Replies
it is all 2d planes arranged in 3d space, even the characters are all spritesheets. so ingame nothing is 3d at all.
small fun fact about the 3d characters, and my saying about 2d is king.
Here is the mesh of Gumo, with a modelled in Mouth that never was used ingame, i just found out about this a few days back, i was just thinking someone from the animators removed the mouth i modelled, but no you really just don't see it, so why bother?
eyes and mouth are just layed over like in windwaker, in most animations even just floating in front of the mesh, not being wrapped around at all.
depthwise we had a custom fog solution with colors (transparency and value) we could blend in over depth. And Depth of Field obviously, which can also be controlled over a custom curve so it is not just linear.
I like this thread. It's a pretty good thread.
so much for not taking a break
take one
do it
Mount Horu Entrance
My first assignement back in may 2014 when I joined MoonStudios was to polish up Mount Horu. Mount Horu was still in a pretty rough spot in most places and was still under construction. The scenes alignement was 100% different the first time I saw it. The way the levels are organized now was a good decision made back then, it was a weird maze before.
The first task was to envision and create a new entrance for Horu. The old one we had was too small and un-epic for Thomas, it had to be more grand and worthy of the last part of a game.
This was the first thing I painted for MoonStudios and I kinda overdid it a bit. But at least I had a good idea of what its supposed to look like afterwards. It took me 2 or 3 days with some iterations to paint. It was my first concept and I didn't know that it is enough to really make a small sketch and then go into the editor and flesh it out there. But it also helped quite a lot to paint so much, because I thus had a good start for new assets. Horu hadn't had any architecture to speak of, so I had to paint a lot of that anyways. A lot of what has been painted for this section was later used in all scenes of Mount Horu. Here is an assetsheet for all assets I painted.
Assetcreation and -integration was really straight forward. All graphics are *.png and were painted in Photoshop and saved into their respective folders. Unity loaded them automatically and a double click brought them into the gameworld. Refresh colliders and you were good to go for testing.
The entrance scene wasn't completely blank, but I was supposed to find a different solution and I could kinda do what I wanted. Gamedesign told me to not make it boring and have a few jump sections in there, but apart from that, this wasn't a gameplay focused section.
The door had to be able to be opened, so I also made a concept for a small sequence there. David put it in game and well, see it ingame. Here is only a small screenshot from it opening. I think it was Max who added some more flames to it. I like it!
My next big task and that was a 3 weeks big task was to setdress and polish the hub you enter right behind the entrance gate. But I didn't have to do this alone. Kaja and I started simultanously on duplicates of the scene to setdress the black blockout. Its easy to bring stuff back together later in Unity. It took a lot of time and I think this is one of the biggest rooms in the game.
This is rougly the blockout from which Kaja and I started to work off of. Every room in the game started with a layout like this. That proved to be the easiest way for the game designers to work on the levels. It then provides the artists with everything they need to work from.
After finishing the first dressing part we had to think about how to design the different doors. The triangle shape of all doors and as a general art direction guideline was something Johannes and Max came up with in the first stages of Mount Horu concepting. Kaja and I took that idea and tried to integrate it into each door in a slightly different way.
Mount Horu is a very very old mountain. Its been there for aeons and hasn't been active for a very long time. Ancient creatures and civilizations used to worship to their gods. Johannes and Max wanted to show this with old carvings, images of old creatures and gods and giving the whole scenery a temple-like ambience. But with Mount Horu errupting and spitting fire most of the structures crumbled and the architecture lies in ruins. Its glory shattered by the strength and rage of the mountain.
Each side of the hub area has four rooms. We tried to make them as distinct and individual as possible with each one having its own theme. One is a spiky hellhole of death and dispear, others are more architectually driven.
Unfortunately there are no real steps of any of our rooms. We were kind of too busy to care about keeping steps. But well, at least we do have the state it is in now, so here you go:
Yours,
Simon Kopp
Im curious. How did you guys do the alignment of ori. As he runs along the ground, he changes the angle depending on the ground itself, rather than just moving up and down, the sprites always facing the same way. Curious how that was done.
I want to pick your brain a bit about the blockout. Clearly this was what you were given by the devs, but I want to know if it was just a texture/image they gave you, or if they used primitives or something similar with collision to make the scene when they gave it to you? I ask, because I want to block out a level in 2d in an effective way, and I just want to know how they did it. It looked like it enabled you guys to produce art for it very fast.
Also, did you use expressly the collision that came from the primitives, or did you use the collision generated from your sprites when it came to gameplay?
@slipsius:
There is no right way or order to play Horu, do as you wish. Every Room is a trial in itself.
@makkon
The blockout you see in the image is in editor. The blockout is done via a modified plane tool with which you can easily block out shapes and roomstructures. So its basically a 3D tool, but its really just a plane.
I don't think that the blockout enabled us to go in with art faster, but... well, it did. If we only had an image of what the level would be we would have many iterations and errors in translation I guess. So yea, it kinda did - compared with an image based blockout.
Colliders are created through a combination of artwork and the blockout, but there also are scenes without blockout at all, so colliders can also work with art only too. And they mostly do.
That plane tool sounds amazing. Is there anything like it that ships with Unity, or was that something the devs cooked up themselves?
I actually have no idea! I've seen 2 different kinds of those tools, so I guess one is Unity one is ours?
I really don't know. Ask our techies!
i think this was probably my biggest contribution to the game, pushing Max in the very early days to break the angular blockouts, making everything much more organic.
Crazy good. Loved the atmosphere to bits, and although it was pretty simple, the story really shone as well.
Oh, yeah. I need a wallpaper version of the main menu with the big tree. That screen was stunning.
I think one of my favorite aspects has to be the sprawling background and near-foreground artwork that is layered to create parallax. It's a bit hard to pick up on all that subtle awesomeness with just the still images in this thread, but it really was some of the little things about Ori that just blew me away.
Well done all! I will be very interested to see what Moon Studios presents next...and if you guys need more modelers.
I like this video Steffen put together - It's a WIP, but I think it's cool enough to share it. It definitely shows how many elements our artists needed to paint to put together a single screen for Ori. That damn game is full of art. Full of it!
And yeah, as you can see, we didn't go for the 'paint 1 texture and tile it across the ground' thing, cause I can spot that kind of thing from a mile away and it always feels kinda cheap. Instead, we had tons of textures and made sure we could put them next to one another without any ugly seams, etc.
You should tweet @XboxP3 and tell Phil that!
You guys gave me and my family hours of enjoyment with this game. It was the least I could do.
From the breakdown it looks as if you did paint light direction into your assets, and if you wanted to control it you covered it with another layer of transparency, either dimming things down or adding another coloured highlight. Is that right? (Uber overdraw?)
I am in love with this game. It's one of the best I have ever played and I really hope we will see more of Nibel. Congratulations to Thomas and all the people at Moon Studios and of course Airborn Studios. You all have done exceptional work.
And thank you very much for sharing with us all those assets and information. It's great reading the posts.
Congratulations guys, really inspiring
Is there anyone on the tech side that would be able to break down how your team handled depth of field? I assume you're using a custom setup that didn't make use of Unity's DOF image effect, but would you be willing to share details? Very interested in this, as I'm trying to help solve the issue for a project built in a pretty similar way to Ori.
Thanks so much for crafting such an awesome game!
i have to spend some time to take a closer look on all the stuff and read the infos.
too bad ori is for the xbox
I have a few questions about the art: How did the artists decide what and how many piece variations they need? Looking at Simon's Mount Horu assets, I don't understand why you need the long railing instead of just combining 3 of the short railing. Was there a specific art direction or a technical limitations for creating the asseets? How did you keep the transitions between assets smooth? Was the animations of the assets done in Unity?
Thank you to everyone who worked on this game, and thank you for the art dump. I wish nothing but the best for the future of ya'lls company
Hm, I don't know about the environment, because I haven't painted those, but I always did around 3 to 5 variations. That just felt like the right amount of variation in order to hide repetition. There weren't really any limitations for creating assets, as they are really nothing else then *.pngs. Well, thats the limitation right there, they had to be *.pngs. But that allows for kinda everything we wanted to do. Further adjustments could all be made in Unity via our tools.
Most of our assets blend into transparency where they are supposed to transition, but we could also add masks ourselfs in Unity.
@ underfox:
I wouldn't bet on an artbook!
Thanks a lot for the reply, Simon! Do you guys scale/stretch any of the assets? If yes, how do you prevent blurring, say when you scale it big?
looking forward for ORI 2