atm we are just happy with the outcome of what we have made here. we will return to this world in one form or another. it is the foundation of many of ours and in parts seems like your guys careers.
But we are a different kind of business, we couldn't possible do this, at this level on the side. A product out of it would be great, but this would need a very different team structure, dedicated people, funding for those and a lot of departments we don't have yet.
It's not a hard no, but right now, we'd have to restructure a fair bit to make this happen. Not impossible, but also nothing to just do
you know I just processed this in my head and the only thing that i got was "YES, we are going to make a game"..so I am ok with that. <3 :D j/k, but man, with the team, with the creativity you guys sit on. jeeez. The talent..
part one of a few things to come on various platforms. Johannes and Simon are talking about the visual development, artdirection and concept art for the showcase.
hard to imagine a game that looks like this not being a big hit. i hope some day it may be realized, reminds me of how adventure movies felt when i was a kid.
Now it would likely be able to do it in nanite, not sure if it handles alphas yet, but it can be used for vegetation since 5.1. but its a lot of very simple geometry some flat facing the camera some not with pixel depth offset to blend it in.
Amazing work. Congratualtions to the whole team, you can clearly see the love that went into this piece.
The fuzz layer on the clothing looks very neat, first i thought handplaced and painted but then hmmm nono to much work for a bunch of characters.
So I assume you guys did some tech tricks behind the curtain? Especially the transition between the basepolys and the seperate fuzz layer looks super clean :)
Would you mind to give some insight or share some advantages/disadvantes of different techniques you guys tried on the way?
the fuzz was something we experimented quite a bit with. while i am not perfectly happy with what we have in the end, i am pretty happy overall.
we thought about doing it similar to how we did fur on crash bandicoot. with planes placed by hand, transferring normals and UVs. but with that you usually have these weird spots where you can look flat on the plane, which i didnt wanna have here. you can do the best job in the world placing these, but you will always have these moments where the illusion breaks, no matter how much time has been spent
like here on the chest of crash:
So i thought it would be nicer to have this done with particles. It was a bit tricky to set up the shaders but @katzeimsack found the solution for it.
So what we do is spawn 3 different particles on the mesh, based on a RGB mask that tells the particle system "spawn particle A here, B here and C there"
I used to paint these masks but turned out, some randomized camo patterns work just as well.
then we grab the normals, roughness, metalness etc from the mesh it spawns on and apply this to the particle
blend them into the mesh using dithered pixel depth offset (like the moss above)
after that we apply one of the 3 different alphas to the particle UVs, randomize rotation and scale within some boundaries and
the result is this:
the downside is, the particles are spawned at random locations. An alternative would be placing them by hand in your dcc like the fur but orienting them to the camera like the particles in unreal. so we have perfect control over placement. but yeah, lot of manual work for that :)
for the future i would limit the random rotation as well so we do not have occasions like above where a shape floats on top. but it was good enough and we are never thaaaat close.
it's particle so it always is oriented towards the camera/screen.
it is really only noticable if you go very close or could orbit around a specific particle, which you can only do inside the editor, not in a sequence, not in a game.
on something more realistic you'd probably use finer lines, looking like individual hairs, it would likely be less noticable here and yet still cheaper than actual hair.
I'm honestly in awe of this project and still am. Thanks so much for sharing, its so inspiring . I hope you don't mind me asking but i was wondering how you went about creating the gradient map as a base for the character? was there a specific process or mostly from combining various map passes? Did you also combine your normal maps using Substance Designer?
Either way thanks so much for sharing, I've been a follower of this since the very early days too as we all have been
@ichidan i will have to track back on that, the project is already archived. but i need to check inside the painter file. its definitely a mix of various maps like AO, the brush strokes, the up-vector from the world space normalmap and such.
this is the basic setup in painter
white * upvector from painterly layer * highpoly AO * lowpoly AO for contact occlusion * cavities + highlights
and then a passthrough layer on top to fix some seams or something
@Neox Ahh this is brilliant though, thank you for the insight! I appreciate you bringing up your thoughts from it being archived too! I didn't think about adding the low AO in there too that's great! Thanks for sharing this
Replies
atm we are just happy with the outcome of what we have made here. we will return to this world in one form or another. it is the foundation of many of ours and in parts seems like your guys careers.
But we are a different kind of business, we couldn't possible do this, at this level on the side. A product out of it would be great, but this would need a very different team structure, dedicated people, funding for those and a lot of departments we don't have yet.
It's not a hard no, but right now, we'd have to restructure a fair bit to make this happen. Not impossible, but also nothing to just do
Royalties or Post-Launch Compensation Work
Just sayin' ;)
hard nope, we either are able to pay our people or we don't do it ;)
anyways in case someone is wondering, we are still prepping portfolio stuff, and will start posting it after next week, once the gamescom is over.
cheers
Took yah long enough..
you know I just processed this in my head and the only thing that i got was "YES, we are going to make a game"..so I am ok with that. <3 :D j/k, but man, with the team, with the creativity you guys sit on. jeeez. The talent..
part one of a few things to come on various platforms. Johannes and Simon are talking about the visual development, artdirection and concept art for the showcase.
@Neox I remember this, 10 years fly so fast! Great to see you are still moving strong with the idea. Good job guys.
Part two, a few more people from a few more departments.
I am still working on the article on our process behind the characters with my team :)
It looks incredible. I love floating islands.
The article is a great read aswell. I like the choice of words for the texturing style:
"splotchy"
😂
hard to imagine a game that looks like this not being a big hit. i hope some day it may be realized, reminds me of how adventure movies felt when i was a kid.
it is what it is :)
we wanted to try something else, less clean, overly polished as we usually do
<3
THis took a tiny bit longer than expected... as usual hehe
well it's post gamescom isnt it?
https://www.artstation.com/airbornstudios/albums/6869014
artstation just released our art blast, where you can find tons of highres images and some making of material.
if you have any questions, just shoot! :)
Unlike most of our projects, here we can break down anything, and are willing to do so!
I was looking at all of the uploads yesterday. Trying to figure out how your moss on stone looks so fluuufffy <3
Now it would likely be able to do it in nanite, not sure if it handles alphas yet, but it can be used for vegetation since 5.1. but its a lot of very simple geometry some flat facing the camera some not with pixel depth offset to blend it in.
Looking through the art blast there is so much awesome stuff! I especially love the ships! Great stuff all round! :)
Amazing work. Congratualtions to the whole team, you can clearly see the love that went into this piece.
The fuzz layer on the clothing looks very neat, first i thought handplaced and painted but then hmmm nono to much work for a bunch of characters.
So I assume you guys did some tech tricks behind the curtain? Especially the transition between the basepolys and the seperate fuzz layer looks super clean :)
Would you mind to give some insight or share some advantages/disadvantes of different techniques you guys tried on the way?
I'm pretty sure people like that detaillayer!
the fuzz was something we experimented quite a bit with. while i am not perfectly happy with what we have in the end, i am pretty happy overall.
we thought about doing it similar to how we did fur on crash bandicoot. with planes placed by hand, transferring normals and UVs. but with that you usually have these weird spots where you can look flat on the plane, which i didnt wanna have here. you can do the best job in the world placing these, but you will always have these moments where the illusion breaks, no matter how much time has been spent
like here on the chest of crash:
So i thought it would be nicer to have this done with particles. It was a bit tricky to set up the shaders but @katzeimsack found the solution for it.
So what we do is spawn 3 different particles on the mesh, based on a RGB mask that tells the particle system "spawn particle A here, B here and C there"
I used to paint these masks but turned out, some randomized camo patterns work just as well.
then we grab the normals, roughness, metalness etc from the mesh it spawns on and apply this to the particle
blend them into the mesh using dithered pixel depth offset (like the moss above)
after that we apply one of the 3 different alphas to the particle UVs, randomize rotation and scale within some boundaries and
the result is this:
the downside is, the particles are spawned at random locations. An alternative would be placing them by hand in your dcc like the fur but orienting them to the camera like the particles in unreal. so we have perfect control over placement. but yeah, lot of manual work for that :)
for the future i would limit the random rotation as well so we do not have occasions like above where a shape floats on top. but it was good enough and we are never thaaaat close.
wow did not expect that! thank you!
That's very interesting way of doing such things. Thank you very much for sharing!
Thats super cool, thanks for sharing with the community 👍️
Interesting!
But it means the fuss is constantly moving when the camera or character moves. 🤔
Probably not that noticeable for this art style! Are you using world, screen or object up vector?
it's particle so it always is oriented towards the camera/screen.
it is really only noticable if you go very close or could orbit around a specific particle, which you can only do inside the editor, not in a sequence, not in a game.
on something more realistic you'd probably use finer lines, looking like individual hairs, it would likely be less noticable here and yet still cheaper than actual hair.
awesome stuff guys! <3 love it!
I bit more breakdown can be found here now :)
Either way thanks so much for sharing, I've been a follower of this since the very early days too as we all have been