Artists will make larger meshes in Maya for frequently occurring patterns and replace their usage in the world. So the first thing we do is merge meshes together, both manually and as an automatic process. This is great for design flexibility, but of course, leads to tons of draw calls. Like many games, our game world is composed of highly modular pieces. We set some distance thresholds that simplify the alpha masks at controlled distances so that we can get simpler looking styled tree silhouettes that feel a bit more painterly than if we simply relied on basic texture mipmaps.Ĩ0lv: Were there any techniques and tricks that allowed you to keep the game running so smoothly and showing all the beautiful stuff you’ve got at a high FPS? Would be awesome to hear about the key things that can reduce draw calls.
This is probably most noticeable with tree foliage. Many of our materials contain distance thresholds to simplify color palettes, alpha masks, and other details so that they can sit properly in the game’s visual hierarchy at any distance from the player. There’s often a player expectation of amazing detail up close, but that detail can turn into a lot of noise at a distance. We also use some styled edge highlighting and distance thresholds for extra detail, but we use more muted color palettes and try to avoid a lot of noise and high contrast specularity. Environment textures contain more detail than the characters and are more heavily sculpted with chunkier, impasto-like shapes. The background/environments are also cell shaded, but we tend to use the PBR blending a little more case by case. Characters are almost always completely cel-shaded, omit indirect lighting, and use very flat textures to reinforce a 2D look. This material can smoothly blend between an artist-controlled cel-shaded look, standard PBR lighting, and any indirect lighting contribution. We developed a shader for use in Unreal materials that makes use of a ramp-like texture to define how the lighting wraps around surface normals. Almost every surface in Spellbreak uses some form of toon shading. In order of visual primacy – Combat VFX > Characters > Environments. All the textures look very cool and soft, creating this lovely atmosphere of a cartoon.Īt a high level we’ve tried to create a strong hierarchy of detail/color/contrast in our shaders/materials that works well for gameplay and mimics the aesthetic of 2D animation. With a solid set of plans, you would be surprised by how efficiently you can populate a map, even one as large as the Spellbreak map.Ĩ0lv: Could you tell us a little bit about the way you’ve been working on the production of the textures? We’re really interested to learn your general pipeline and especially talk about the shaders you are using.
Fortunately, our environment artist is extremely seasoned, but this is no substitute for planning out what you want to build. Ironically, we really just use the Unreal Toolset for populating the spaces, and Maya for modeling the assets themselves.
#Spellbreak character creation how to
We’re super interested to learn how to make these large, visually rich places, and fill them with interactive objects. Environment ProductionĨ0lv: Can you tell us how you generally work on the meshes and the environments in the project? You’ve got to have quite spacious arenas here. We even made our own Kuwahara shader expressly to allow things in the distance to appear more painterly. Working with the rest of the art team, we’re still approaching a lot of this look.
When our Art director rebooted, he specifically stated he wanted to go with more of an animated, heavily stylized approach that was more reminiscent of titles such as Avatar: the Last Airbender and The Dragon Prince. When we were prototyping we had a very different style for the game, that really worked but was more medieval than magical. 80lv: Could you talk a little about the way you’ve figured out the style for the visuals? What’s the technology behind it, how do you achieve this look? How did the earlier prototypes for the game look?
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