Hi everyone!
Abrakam put together a dev diary detailing some aspects of the art creation pipeline that they used during the production of Shadows of the Shroud, so you get a surprise Tuesday dev diary this week.
We’ll still have my dev diary about our next update on Thursday, which will be a little later than usual.
Take it away!
I'm Mikhail Pestov, a 2D artist at Abrakam Entertainment, and I'd like to tell you a little more about the portrait creation process for Shadows of the Shroud.
Today I'll be talking about the Tankbound portrait, which was a particularly special one that we knew was planned to be linked to a new Civic, but this process was generally the same for each one we produced.
These were the concepts I was provided by our lead artist: Jordi.
Brains!
As you can see, details can range on these initial concepts from being very abstract to quite detailed. In this case, Jordi had also prepared a 3D concept, which is not typical but is done on some occasions. He must have liked this one.
My job is to render the final illustrations and prepare them for animation... so based on these, I tested several different options.
Psionic portraits were unique in that each was prepared with a special "Ascended" version.
Sometimes the team and I immediately agree on a direction, and sometimes... well, sometimes, we need to do some heavy reworking. At this point in development we decided that we simply had too many 'brainy' portraits lined up and wanted to limit their appearance going forward. No problem, we can do that.
Brainless.
We decided a pseudo 'energy' would be appropriate for this type of setup. While I typically work from an existing concept, I often have to create something new and solve non-obvious problems. This is an ongoing process involving communication with my teammates, feedback, ultimately to help make a character truly interesting!
In this case, we decide that this is much closer to what we want to see. The team approves the direction, and I start rendering. This is a process of refining the sketch more carefully, correcting mistakes, adding details, and texturing materials like metal or glass in greater detail.
They've got legs, and they don't really know how to use them.
Once everything is ready and we feel that it's 100% right, I move on to polishing. This stage includes adding textures, small abrasions, highlights, scratches, etc. Things you'd expect to see on mechanical tanks that move around in spaceships.
Which tank are you?
At this point, the figures reach their final appearance. Now I move on to the final, most technical, stage: the preparation for animation.
This involves painstakingly separating the portrait into its base components. This often means adding or redoing something if I recognize there will be problems in animating a particular element. Once the team gives it the thumbs up, I send it to our animator who brings it to life: Bastien.
And that's how a baby Tankborn was… born.
Hi everyone. I’m Aurelio La Ferla, Senior Hard Surface Artist at Abrakam Entertainment, and today we're gonna give a look at my approach on both the Mindwarden and Psionic 3D shipset for Shadows of the Shroud.
The process I followed for both shipsets is similar on some steps, but really different on some others.
We have to keep in mind that Mindwardens ships are more spiky, most of the time formed by squared and triangular shapes. Psionic, on the other hand, have more soft shapes with curved silhouettes. This is fundamental to understanding the best approach in the modeling/sculpting phase.
Starting with Mindwardens, I'm gonna talk a bit about the general steps trying my best to not be too technical and boring 
:)
As previously said, Mindwarden ships are mostly based on square and triangle shapes, so what I did is basically start the modeling process from very primitive shapes following the concept previously did by the concept artists.
Primitive building blocks.
After having a rough base to work from, I then added details, bevels, and generally smoothed them out to make them as clean as possible for the highpoly.
The smoothest triangles you'll ever see.
Once I do this for all the main pieces, I start to put them together. This is building the structure of the spaceship piece by piece, always following the concept until I have the complete ship built it up in highpoly.
Highpoly Mindwarden Colossus.
After building the highpoly, what I usually do is a quick highres render, with some basic metallic material and lights and send it to the rest of the team for design approval. Now it really starts to come to life.
The forbidden flower.
Once the 3D highpoly is fully approved, I’m ready to move on to the lowpoly model. For the Mindwardens specifically, most of the time I tweaked some of the base pieces used for the highpoly to repurpose for the low.
When the lowpoly is ready and the structure of the spaceship is done, I proceed to work on the UVs. This is the flat 2D representation of the 3D model, fundamental for the baking and texturing phase.
Like taking apart the most complicated cardboard box.
Now it's ready to bake, but using a computer as an oven. This is the process that “transfers” the details from the highpoly to the lowpoly model. The whole reason for doing all of this is to have everything look highly detailed, while still being optimized for real-time performance in-game.
The very last step for me is the texturing.
Ready to seal the Shroud.
For the texturing process I used materials produced by one of our technical artists. Now the model is ready to be rigged and animated!
Finally, here are some final renders of the Colossus:
For the Psionic shipset, the process is more or less the same, but the initial approach is different ‘cause the shapes are more soft and curved.
The process always involves:
Highpoly
Lowpoly
UVs
Bake
Texturing
But the initial part is more of a “sculpting” process.
Basically, starting from primitive shapes, I sculpt every piece of the spaceship and put them together. The sculpt is an easier and more proper way to approach these kind of shapes.
Digital clay.
Once again, with the highpoly sculpt finished and approved, it's time for the lowpoly.
In this case the approach is different from the Mindwardens, ‘cause here we are gonna have a highpoly sculpt that needs to be lowered down in terms of its tris-count, or number of triangles it has. The Mindwardens started basically as triangles, so they cheated a bit. So, we are gonna build a more clean and lower density topology through the “retopology” process.
Exterminating triangles.
And this is the final result of that process. As you can see, the model went from a really high tris density to one that can be used more practically for animation and in-game.
The retopology process is not always necessary. Sometimes if the sculpt topology is clean enough, it’s possible to lower the tris-count just by simplifying some shapes or removing some edgeloops.
Once the lowpoly is ready, the rest of the process is the same as above.
Here some renders of the final result:
Behold, the Psionic Ion Cannon.
Hope you all enjoyed it!
