Eight pillars of style

Author: Salireths

After I've completed the preview of the city, I found a way for the game to have a better art pipeline, one that would be much more fun for me to keep creating, would take less time to complete, and would have a unique look further reinforcing the new character style.

Optimizations like that are important, especially when you're 1 person creating this vast amount of places for players to explore, where each little level can easily take multiple months of work - we want them coming up faster.

I'm going after a specific style of concept art, usually done for big movies and games, with the raw, crude digital brushstrokes, the sharp, pronounced silhouettes, and the details suggested by quick textures and shapes, not by meticulous painting.

Concept art is made this way because its supposed to be fast, it suggests form without fully completing it, letting your brain fill in the blanks - It focuses on the picture as a whole. The question is, how do we bring some of that into the realm of 3d and game-making?

Almost all games have some sort of concept art drawn for them, but almost no game ends up looking like concept art, unless it has a specific art direction for that.

Here are my 8 pillars of style that I'm using to achieve this:

Focus on strong Silhouettes.

Silhouettes are important in any composition, but here especially so, because they are pretty much our only way to build appealing scenes.

Use transparent textures for creating multi-layered complexity.

The "lasagna" of multiple transparent cards/sprites, even though flat, can create a nice illusion of complex details. And it's much quicker to paint these, rather than model actual geometry

Keep realistic proportions and sizes.

Not having cartoon or caricature proportions will help ground the composition.

Most painterly, lineart, and celshaded games have cartoony proportions and heavily stylized, exaggerated props and caricature characters. While it is certainly appealing, I believe I can improve immersion if I rather stick to a certain degree of realism.

Sample colors from real places.

Similar to the previous one, not having vivid cartoony pallets will ensure a realistic feel, even if its not detailed to individual pebbles, like "realistic style" often demands.

Use photo-scanned objects when possible.

Quixel Megascans is a library of photo-scanned assets that is free for Unreal Engine developers, and it would be a big waste not to utilize a resource that is equivalent to employing many environment artists. But because those assets are 3d-scans of real objects I need to convert them so they match the game's unique style.

Simplified textures that only imply details.

One big sink of my time was having to create intricate textures for the game, spent months making them, and I still needed hundreds more.
From now on the textures are more stylized, and 20 times faster to create (1 hour vs 2 days). Old ones are going to be converted to the new style too, so at least I didn't waste time on them.

If you have an Nvidia card, launch some latest AAA game and open GeForce Experience, there, select "Game Filter" and add a "Painterly" effect. Pretty isn't it? You don't need a lot of details to have a detailed picture.

Use line-art to bring everything together.

I know its a polarizing preference. Some people love lines, some don't. I did come to conclusion that I, in fact, love these lines.

And as for people who don't - it would be easy for us to make a setting which can adjust certain things about visual style, such as line thickness or even strength of textures on the models. It's a game about customization, so why not alter how it looks for you?

If it takes too much time, do something else.

Probably the most important thing to remember. There have been times where I've been going in circles creating some rock by sculpting each separate facet and crack in it. Or place individual leaves on a branch, and place each individual branch on a trunk of a tree.

Needless to say how time-consuming it is. We're not making a game about pretty rocks and trees, we're making a game about sexy Dragons and Furries. Yes.

Conclusion

Work in progress on the bio-tech hatchery. (Lines disabled) 

I hope you're liking my art direction as much as I do. I think I finally did something I consider worthwhile. Its not perfect, of course, but, (don't want to sound narcissistic) I'm quite proud of it. It combines speed/efficiency and a striking visual style in a mix I haven't really seen done before.

Next up I'm going to continue building up this style and art-tools for it, and then finally integrate the new characters, bringing the entire visual picture together, at last.

Thank you for reading!