No actual painting takes place in the first video. Instead we go through mesh simplification, examining the mesh, sizing things up, and generally getting things prepared so that we can just sit down and paint in the next video.
The second video shows the first of the 11 custom Arks that kickstarter backers commissioned for the game. This will be one of the Arks that anyone who plays the game gets to choose between.
This Ark, dubbed the “Rorqual Hegira”, was the vessel for the cetacean flight from Sol. I can’t say any of those words. 😉
Anyway, this goes through the process of actually doing the painting to make the cel-shaded baseline turn into a PBR (Physically Based Rendering) style. Basically what that means is taking something that looks intentionally cartoony and adding on a layer of processing that makes it react to light more like real materials do.
As part of that I also wind up adding various procedural details, naturally, as Substance Painter is really excellent for that sort of thing. All those little scratches and splotches and so forth that humans just aren’t meant to paint by hand with any speed or lack of repetition.
This video took way longer than I expected, mainly because my first idea for how to handle the metal body didn’t work out (I had feared from the start it might not, but it was a fun one to try), and because handling the “glass with something down inside it” is an inherently super-tricky request, and something I wanted to do justice to rather than just slapping an emissive glow on it and calling it good. I’m quite happy with how the result came out, although we’ll see what the backer thinks once he sees this video.
Enjoy!
Chris
