Dev Log #4.4 - Art updates

Hello and welcome to another art update. This week we are starting with updates on characters from the artist majikarpette. in this sprite you can see the shipyard’s cook, Maelle.

In most gamedev studios, the role of concept artist, character designer, and writer are separated.

But For us, it makes perfect sense to let the artist fill up the page with extra headcannons.

This addled granularity makes it more fun to imagine responses to events that the advisors will suggest. This is similar to oil painters who tone their canvas value down from 100% white to a warm 50% grey tone.

We also have an update from Majikarpette on Senara, the ship designer.

Will hear more about (or possibly from) senara in the in wind propulsion laboratory episodes.

All of these characters are here to make people interested in decarbonization of the oceans and wind propulsion. It would be too abstract and just a PDF white-paper of 200 pages otherwise.

Without the little cartoon Kerbals in KSP, Kerbal Space Program would not be what it is.

the yardies and advisors is how we aim to do a similar magic trick for The Shipyard.

And now for the main topic of today’s dev log.

Blender tips for Lowpoly Handpainted texturing

In the last dev logs about art, we left off with the AO bake here. I skipped the usual highpoly step, and looking to use the lowpoly style to my advantage. I treat it as if I was hand-painting a wooden model with acrylic.

I’m using Blender to texture this building. We are using this brushpack from CR.

Here are the most important settings, on the top right of the 3D view:

Tab, you’re in edit mode, select faces, click this button, tab out, you’re in texture painting mode, now painting only on the selected faces. The more lowpoly you are, the more useful this little button becomes.

Note: selecting all of an object at once with the “L” shortcut becomes more useful than ever.

In the tools settings of your brush in the texture painting mode, I recommend turning off normal falloff but leaving occlude. Falloff leads to incorrect shading, and we want the colors we apply to be “flat” and not come with additional gradients.

Uncheck that shit. We don’t need it where we’re going.

In the top right of your 3D view in texture painting mode is options for brush and texture, which we will cover later. But for now please note how useful “line” is as a choice of “stroke method”.

For all things that need to repeat and are man-made in particular. It all depends on whether you are trying to reinforce a vertical/horizontal line, or break it by adding handpainted imperfections.

For example this roof was painted rather quickly in top view. After a big gradient in multiply mode, I selected lines 8px wide.

This then curves nicely, without you having to do any guesswork. You can create another brush by duplicating it (the icon with two sheets next to the texture’s name) and change the stroke method to “anchored”. Anchored is what you want to place alphas, such as leaks, wood and metal damage which would be too time consuming to paint every time.

We then paint the rest of the thing, aiming to find a nice balance between large blocky colors, and fine details from alphas. I like to use multiply blend mode so that I can paint directly on top of the AO. This is not really a recommended solution, but just showing that there is a million ways to start.

Multiply mode on top of AO is kind of a basic trick done by 2D artists for decades to quickly make color variations of a character or prop without changing the underlying lighting.

Some add-ons in blender enable texture painting to work in PSD-like layers, which blender does not technically handle by default (yes, shader nodes, but not in the texture workflow itself in a way that can be merged easily).

Comparison between the UV map and the 3D view of the same object.

Using edit mode “selected faces only “ masking trick described earlier to paint the boat’s deck and add rust marks.

I increased the resolution to 4K so I could add the ink outlines on some objects.

Later, we’re hoping that by the time the game comes out, an efficient way to export and render the grease pencil data from blender will exist. The main advantage of GP over doing it in the texture is to stay independent from texture resolution. This means the art direction could in theory stay consistent across multiple type of devices.

That’s it for this week!

Next week we’ll likely present some information about the wind-propulsion technologies we feature in the game, and how we plan to simplify this information down to fun gameplay archetypes.

• Shipyard Devlog
• Art
• Characters