Stylized Texture Tutorial

windygames:

Hello Everyone! It’s Emily, Windy Games’ artist! I wanted to do a short tutorial on how I make the textures for Miasma Caves. It’s a process that has saved me lots of time and produced relatively good results, and so I wanted to share.

One of the first things I did before deciding on a pipeline was to have a sit-down with the director of the game, Adam, to discuss his vision for the look and feel of the environment. We wanted something cartoony, but with a fair amount of depth to make the flat mesh surfaces of the voxels more interesting. Photo-realism was out, as it would clash with the anime-inspired character design, but I felt that sticking to only a hand painted diffuse texture aesthetic would take away from the detail that normal maps could offer us. We needed a texture style that was stylized and saturated, but interesting enough that it could be repeated over large areas of the cave without becoming boring and flat.

Step 1:

I start in Zbrush with a UV-mapped plane, then add a few zsphere subtools that I’ve Dynameshed. I stretch them out and get them so they are roughly the shape I want, and fit well together, using the plane as a guide for the texture space. To make the texture tile, at some point I take any rocks on the top row and move them to the bottom, and take the ones on the left and move them to the right as I’m working, to make sure that the edge pieces fit with both sides of the texture (At the end, after detailing them, I duplicate these edge pieces and put a copy of them along the other edge). Next, I break out my hPolish, Planer, and ClipCurve Brushes to add some chips and flat planes to the rocks; basic techniques for sculpting cartoon rocks that you can use for decorative models in your environment as well.

Step 2:

Once I’ve tested that my texture tiles, and I’m satisfied with the way it looks, I export it as a high resolution OBJ. I export the base plane to be the low res OBJ. (In the example, for the high res, I’ve done a projection on a plane for my final model, but I often just export the merged rocks without doing anything further to them.)

Step 3:

Use whatever texture baking program you prefer — I’m a fan of Substance Painter/Designer — to bake a number of maps from the high res to the low res models.

RECOMMENDED MAPS

- Cavity or Curvature

- Ambient Occlusion (AO)

- Normal

Step 4:

Go into Photoshop with your baked maps. Make a Fill layer with the basic color you want. I often decide this beforehand, when I am planning a color palette for the environment.

Now put your maps in layers above the color layer:

- Curvature (Blending Mode: Overlay) to define my creases, giving a cell-shaded look.

- AO (Blending Mode: Multiply) gives some nice shadows.

- Normal Map Green Channel (Blending Mode: Overlay) - Save your normal map separately, so you can use it in the Unity material. Take the Normal map and copy the Green or Red channel to give lighting information to your texture.

After that, copy a merged version of your texture and do a paint-over. Don’t leave in any 100% black areas. Add interesting colors to your shadows. Use Adjustments to control the contrast and saturation. The last thing I do is add some noise to the image, often in the form of a layer of rainbow clouds set as a Hue Blend above the texture layer.

And that’s basically it! You can take the Normal Map and Diffuse Map you made and plug them into Unity’s default material, play with your Metallic and Smoothness, and you are all set.

For further reading, there’s actually a more in-depth article on a similar technique by a Blizzard artist in Vertex Magazine that I really recommend checking out. I found it while I was experimenting with this style and it pushed me in a good direction! In general, if you are interested in Game Art, Vertex has a lot of good content that might be worth perusing.

Lesath’s Log - Slimes

windygames:

Slimes are one of the more common animals I’ve encountered while exploring the caves, and perhaps one of the strangest. They are undulating, green, gelatinous creatures, barely coming up to my knees, with a solid core suspended in their center. I theorize that this core, which emits a soft glow, must be the source of their life-force and cognition, for otherwise I cannot fathom how so simple a creature might navigate the wet, rocky terrain of these caverns.

Slimes seem to pose no threat to other creatures, and indeed, those I have encountered have proven a mere nuisance, mostly due to their taste for precious stones, crystals, and other valuable items. I do not know how many treasures I’ve lost to their single-minded appetites, only that when I happen across the tell-tale green puddles they exude upon feeding, I know that I am too late. I take heart in the fact that they are both slow and timid, and that even the vibration of approaching footsteps is enough to frighten them into abandoning any gems they may be in the process of eating.

I’ve been told that slimes are occasionally hunted for their cores, which are prized for their reactivity in the presence of gems. In the hands of a skilled craftsman, a core can be fashioned into equipment capable of guiding a treasure-seeker to their prize; however, extracting a slime’s core is said to be a long and arduous process, and few are taken intact.

I like the shader we made for this guy. Follow Windy Games for more of our Miasma Caves lore and art.