Deus Ex: Universe Art Dump Thread
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.
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!
Replies
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
@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.
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?