Bulletrage

Apocrs1980

Hello fellow pollycounters, 
I have shelved my ARPG project for now as I no longer have anyone to help me with programming.
So, instead I have hooked up with the team at Chimera One working on the game Bulletrage. 

I figured I would post some screenshots of the art I have done in collaboration with other artists and get opinions. 

This is a prop I did modeled and textured.

And here is a screenshot of some of the new art I have been working on.

And finally,  an in game screen shot as of tonight of how the game is looking now.

As always comments and critiques are welcomed. My goal is to make the game as visually appealing to match the awesome game play.

Cheers for now

~Apoc.

Apocrs1980

Got the BFMG finished yesterday,  looking great when in use, Iceb got the particle emitter set up for the empty casings and the rotation of the barrels 😎

Apocrs1980

Hello polycounters, been a while but I have been hard at work on this project.  I'm super excited that we will be able to get the new demo out soon. 

Got some great screen shots from our testers figured I would share one with you all. 

The game continues to be so much fun to work on. 

I've also had to buckle down on my animation skills so it's been a great challenge as well. 

Cheers for now and thanks for checking it out! 

~Apoc

Brian "Panda" Choi

AHH YEET.  

Apocrs1980

Good afternoon fellow Polycounters, And thank you @Brian "Panda" Choi!

Quick update to current development, we're happy to finally get the demo of BulletRage up on Steam!

With he demo now done I can move on to working on to adding in the core assets to the game, which means getting the final player character models done.

Due to development time, schedule, and most of us working on the project full time with no funding we have done what we can to help speed up the process, the main director has decided to purchase a base model for the human characters.

Even though I would have prefeed to model them myself, I get time constraints and I was still able to do some extra modeling modifications to fit the suit we need.

That said, it doesn't stop me from doing paint and this allows me to really push myself and learn what I can in Substance. However, I found when working on a semi-realistic human in Substance if you do not have a good video card you can run into serious memory issues, hence why the armor is still looking poop and is WIP, because I literally can't see where I am painting in the layers.

But then again, this is more of a dev blog on my work so far so here is my current progress on painting the Male player character.

I think it's turning out well, continuing to push where I can with the video card limitations causing all sorts of data loss.

Base Model created by Alex Lashko

Thanks again all for stopping by to take a look!

~Apoc

Apocrs1980

Hello Poly counters, just dropping by doing post more updates on (or I guess my dev blog on) BulletRage.

I've finished the base armor and model and have moved on to doing the Tier 1 armor drops, just finished the body today, now moving on to the Helmet and gloves, later the boots, and once finished I'll be adding that extra polish such as dirt, dust, scratches, and roughness variation.

Thank you all for taking a look!

Cheers! ~ Apoc

Kanni3d

What a lovely set of armor! Would love to see more, keep em coming

Apocrs1980

@Kanni3d thanks so much, I plan to keep this thread updated with my weekly development on the art.

I was asked by Substance on Twitter to share my workflow process as I am using a low poly base mesh and only using Substance painter to achieve the final results.

So, here is the breakdown of my process:

1. PREPARATION:

All good design begins with conceptualizing what you are going for.

In my specific case I'm tasked with creating a wide variety of armor which shares the same base mesh which had me looking around the net at examples.

Pinterest and Artstation are fantastic resources and may spark an idea, for this suit I decided to use human anatomy and referenced the human muscular structure a lot!

Next I prep my base mesh for paint, this is different depending on your set up, but for me, I UV'd corrected any funky normals, and then explode my model. (Move all pieces away from each other)

This allows me to do 2 things:

1. Easily see all angles of the piece I am working on and 

2. Avoids accidental bleeding over while painting on it to another piece.

Alternatively, if having the model exploded is breaking your visual flow of how everything looks assembled you can assign different materials to the pieces and have them on their own separate texture sheet in Substance Painter, this will achieve the same effect.

Maps can be re-combined later so long as they don't overlap in UV space. 

I then bring the base mesh into painter and do a bake of the mesh maps from the low poly its self. (The mesh maps generated are for use with the generators and filters used later.)

2. TEXTURING:

Next, I start with a base material, the idea and workflow is to think about the very bottom base material and work your way up, layer by layer.

If you are familiar with how layers work in Photoshop the concept is the same in Substance Painter.

For my base, I decided to go with a plastic rubber.

I primarily only work with fill layers as I find this useful for a multitude of reasons, the first of which is that adding a black mask, you can quickly iterate and correct anything that does not flow, and second for this model I need to generate masks of different areas for a color change shader in Unity when I'm finished. 

Next, I work on the material I want for using and mimicking the muscle structure, again reference, reference, reference!!!

I experimented with some of the materials offered by Substance and really liked the hexagon plastic grid grain as it fit the look.

Once I have a new material I rarely mask the layer it's self, instead I group the material in its own folder and add the black mask to the grouped folder it's self. This way any changes I make to the group will not affect the other laters it's masked over.

Oh! And one very important step, make sure your hight channels for the materials are set to (Normal) they are on linear dodge by default, this will prevent the normal information from bleeding over to any additional layers painted over top of it, such as the metal plates  I will do later.

Note: Again, even in the smaller grouped folders I have set up, I'm working in layers starting from the base and building it up.

Adding normal information:

So, this is where Substance Painter really shines for me, it is not difficult to take something which has zero normal information and create your own using hight information with Substance. You may choose to do this for a few reasons instead of modeling out the detail in Zbrush

1. Again FAST, painless, nondestructive, iteration! If a design fails or calls for a change late in the process and that information is hard baked into the normal map, you have to go back into ZBrush change it, rebake, etc. etc. this costs time!

In Painter making these changes is as simple as painting on a mask or moving a layer and takes seconds! Work smarter not harder!

Remember, do not just think in terms of color, always think in terms of painting in height, roughness, and metallic values!

These channels I find to be far more valuable for defining realistic results!

To achieve the look of having this hexagonal fabric bump out, I again used a fill layer and only singled out the Height channel, I pushed the height to a value of 1 (maximum height) then I added a paint layer and used a soft brush to paint in additional height information set back to 0 around the edges of the pattern which leaves a rough edge, not the desirable look.

But, we are about to fix that with the magical tools Substance Painter has at its disposal!

Substance has just about every tool and goodie you can think of to help you achieve the look and effect you're going for you just need to know where to look, most of these are in the form of filters (again similar to Photoshop) which you can append to a layer to give it an additional adjustment.

In this case, I added a filter to my height layer and chose the blur filter, this allows me to have total control over how pronounced or recessed the hight information is on my hexagon fabric.

And the results:

Next, I wanted something that connects the fiber material and looks more robust so after some experimenting, I chose to go with a Latex as it simulated the material properties I wanted to look like a harder more durable material.

I used a few more laters in this group but essentially, the process is the exact same as I described above.

Everything pertaining to the latex material I kept contained in its own group, the difference here is I have a few height layers in which I used to achieve some bump to the material similar to that I did with the hexagon fabric but a heavier setting on the blur and another to recess and alpha for screws stamped in to show where the materials connect. I also added some roughness layers using a grunge map as my alpha and painting in dark to light grey values to help break up the uniformity of the glossiness of the latex to give it a more realistic look.

Roughness and metallic are a very important aspect of making a model believable, it can be easily overlooked or some may think that the base roughness is "good enough" but I object, Roughness and Metallic values are where an artist can truly go wild, there is so much that can be done in these channels and it's so much fun to watch what was mehh go to stellar!

You can single out the channels in the drop down of the view pane, as with everything darker values are less rough and shiny while the lighter values are the roughest.

I decided to leave my base rubber its default value as even when worn rubber's roughness does not change much.

This on it's own I think could hold up well design wise but, this guy is in an arena full of death and bullets. Let's give him a chance to survive by adding the armor plates!

Adding the Armor:

For the armor again, this is much of the same, using different height laters to break up and add more plains to an otherwise flat material.

I achieved this with using alphas and black masks on fill layers independent from one another, this way if I did not like the result say for bolt placement I could easily erase and redo it without having to redo the plane alphas as well.

I also added in a yellow bronze material, masked it with a black mask, disabled its height and normal channels, and painted in the values to accent areas on the armor which were looking too uniform.

Again, keeping it all to its own grouped folder I could easily paint in or out this material on the fly if something conceptually was not looking right, working out, or asked to be changed last minute without affecting any of the base materials we added so far!

3. Finalizing and adding the final bits and details:

After this, I continued the same process for the fabric, added in some white highlights (which later are used in color change to help define the player in multiplayer games) and did an additional roughness pass adding in more rough areas in the recesses of the metal plates to further sell the 3d look. you can also add in AO information and have any last minute details follow all of the height information you made by creating an anchor and referencing that anchor point in the materials micro normal/micro height! It's awesome!

They explain the process in depth here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w44yuMFtFyM&index=10&list=PLB0wXHrWAmCwnqWfKdGEmbtSKN2EzvLrY 

If you haven't watched the videos done by the guys at Algorithmic I strongly suggest giving them a watch.

I used Substance Painter's renderer to render out my screenshots when finished, in particular, I like the tone mapping of Senitomectric and a Panorama environment with the background disabled. I generally let it render for 200 passes.

Thank you all for stopping by and having a look and read.

I hope this helps out other users who are learning Substance Painter, I am by far not the best, so continue to learn from others and push your limits.

If you're not able to find the specific material you need I highly recommend Substance Designer, where you can create your own, it's very powerful stuff!

Apoc

Casey Sharer - Creative Director

ChimeraOne Games

Apocrs1980

Next up in the development pipeline... Weapons.

I'm tasked with assisting in redesigning all of the weapons and giving them a major graphical upgrade.

I think I found a decent workflow from 3Ds Max and Substance Painter.

Here are the results: My futuristic quad barreled machine gun.

I authored a color mask shader in Unity to allow the paint to be changed to any color. Works like a charm.

This project was very challenging as I have never done a weapon from concept to engine before but I'm glad I did.

One down...10 more to go.

Thank you all for taking the time to look!

Apocrs1980

Good evening Polycounters!

another update in my continual work on BulletRage.

I have finished another weapon for the players to use, the RSE03 High Powered Rail Gun.

This should put holes in any enemies attempting to hide behind one another. :0

I did all the work on this piece as well from concept to final model and imported into Unity.

I hope you all like it as much as I do.

Cheers for now,

~Apoc

Apocrs1980

Hey Polycounters! Long time no post on the project but for very good reason, I have been diligently working on level 2's kit and a ton of assets here are some of my scificrates loaded with bullets I just finished

 also a snippit of the kit I've been building for world2 here:

What's even more awesome is it's been a very long time in the making but we have finally taken the project live on Kickstarter!!! So now everyone can download the demo and play and look at everything we've been working on and what is to come in the near future!

you can get the demo here:

https://bulletrage.com/ks 

Thanks all and I will post more when we have more updates to show

~Cheers Apoc