At the beginning of brain storming for our game, there was a large disconnect between what we wanted and what we could achieve artistically. The scope of this game was large, and there was a lot placed on the shoulders of the two artists who thought they would be in charge of modeling and animating a town, multiple interactable NPCs and a fully explorable and realized forest. This seems like a really cool idea until you figure in the timeline and amount of artists on our team. So upon taking this all into consideration, we went through the (somewhat) intensive process of scaling back our game and turning it into something we knew we could all accomplish.

We knew that, as a team, we wanted to capture this sense of childlike wonder and playfulness, and this is 100% capturable in an art style. Through different iterations, we came to capture this by using a couple different techniques. The main character was modified in this sense to be cuter, using more polys, and more colors to show expression and liveliness. This set the tone of a majority of the assets to follow, staying in line with this style of mostly rounded shapes and exaggerated features.

Our assets capture this sense by using painting techniques. After our base colors, roughness and ambient occlusion are baked in Substance Painter, we would take the color map into Photoshop and paint over it with a blend brush. This gave all assets a sense of painterly cohesiveness while also fitting in this cute/childlike aesthetic. As shown below, the image to the left is our initial bake in Substance, and the image on the right is what the final asset looks like once it was stylized and painted over in Photoshop.

This allows us to have more control over the final color palette of the environment assets, as well as painting in extra details. We can also play around with subtle gradients during this painting process which adds extra depth and appeal to the final environment.

After this phase it all comes down to testing these assets in our scene, playing around with import settings, colors and lighting to make sure each prop is exactly how we want it. This might take several passes of iteration before we get it right, rarely does it fit cohesively into the environment the first try. With each pass-over the quality and unity between assets always improves, and us artists are able to learn something new every time that helps the pipeline become quicker and easier.

Jack Tenda, 3D Artist