Artstyle hunt

Artstyle hunt

The last two weeks I've been searching for an artstyle which should fit a few criteria:

  • The artstyle fullfills the artistic desire to make something that looks amazing.
  • It has an art pipeline which allows for quick creation of game-ready assets.

To tick both these boxes, I have a feeling we need to become clever.

To become clever, we first need to explore a bit. Last week I spent a few days doing art experiments. Techniques ranging from polygons to billboards.

Billboard creatures

The billboards based approach seemed like a promising direction. In this style, assets are really easy to make and they look good from most directions. There is a very straighforward pipeline for getting the assets into the game:

  • Draw the texture
  • Map it onto a plane
  • Construct a character from the planes

And that's all there is to it. This is the level of simple we are looking for.

Actually thinking more about it, the problem is more about designing an art pipeline, which then produces the artstyle. The dark polygonal characters are attempts at capturing the vibe of the concept art. But the approach to make them is too freeform. There is no system in place to guide the process.

Can we develop a pipeline that produces the 'angular ink' look from our concept art? Spoiler: yes!


Billboards lack body, and they can never be as sharp as polygons. Vector billboards? We might as well do 3d, because that technically converts the 2d art into 3d polygons anyway!

The Ink Block system

I know, super catchy name. 😎

This system is based on combining tilesets together with cubes that serve as basmeshes to work from. The idea is that pre-texturing a bunch of cubes and 'kneading' them into building blocks will provide a great library to make characters with.

Early tests are promising. Modeling a belt was as easy as adding a few edge loops. Duplicating a stack works quite well, because of the ink concept. The solid black color hides any imperfections, makes shapes blend together and provides a strong silhouette.

Outlines are generated using a solidify modifier. This is the 'inverted hull' technique which basically copies the object geometry, offsets it and flips the normals.

To get that artistic offset look, we can further translate this geometry using a vertex group + noise texture. The outline is baked into the export, so we don't have to worry about making a Unity shader which does the same thing.

With the Ink Block system we should be able to create some crazy silly designs whilst still keeping an overall consistent artstyle. At least that's what I hope.

Looks familiar...

Madworld is both beautiful and hard to look at. It's actually difficult to take a pleasing screenshot of this game, because it has so much (visual) shit going on. It's not readable at all!

So it's safe to say, I definitely don't want our game to look like this. With an ink heavy style, marrying the characters to the environment is going to be a next challenge. We may need to develop a more toned down version of the Ink Block system for the world itself.

Another option is to add a bit of color by assigning vertex colors and multiplying that with the texture values.

With vertex colors applied, the style can be shaped into something that really stands on it's own. In this example I used the color temperature of the artwork on the right. More experimentation is needed!

Extra's

This last week I've been doing a bit more technical artist stuff. If I can develop some scripts or shaders that make my life easier as an artist, I'm happy.

Cloth sprite

One train of thought was: If we make all sorts of creatures or units, maybe if we give them big drapes of cloth or fur, it could hide some of their imperfectness.

I was still thinking in billboards at the time. So I made a billboard 'cloth sprite' script. Well, actually I made ChatGPT write a script for the Unity Line Renderer using a verlet integration. But the idea is mine! We can worry about writing a 'correct' script later. This is prototyping!

The Unity Line Renderer doesn't actually draw lines though. It draws meshes, which can be assigned materials. So that's perfect for making cloaks, ropes or chains.

The cloth sprites attached to the character make it appear dynamic instantly. Bloodborne has a lot of characters which also just have a lot of cloth attached. It's a cheat to make things look cool!

Fun fact: The limbs of this character are also drawn with a Line Renderer. First I wanted to see if I could get away with floating limbs, but while messing around with the Line Renderer, I figured I could use it to draw the limbs just as easily.

This character was actually made before the Ink Block system. I wanted to have a character to attach the cloak to, so I had to make the parts. When doing that I already noticed: I just want a library of parts so I can throw something together.

BRRRR

Idunno, I was just checking out Shadergraph. Well, I think this can be the basis of a cool casting aura effect.


Imagine using that effect on a shape like this with a falloff towards the top and bottom edges. Could be really neat.