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I've had so much fun working with this style! It's nothing like anything I've done before so I had a lot to learn but loved every minute of it.
I started by collecting all the reference I could, mostly outside games. I especially loved the work of JR Schmidt, Timothy J. Reynolds, Mateusz Szulik and other masters. Endless inspiration…
To begin with I was looking at an even more minimalist look of single-colour environments under a deep contrasting sky, relying on ambient occlusion to give the terrain it’s form. I loved it, but then the design developed and we needed different looks for different areas – different colours for giving the player the feedback they needed an so on. Also the procedurally animated game play is very dynamic – the whole world is physical so you can push and pull plants, pick giant fruit and of course grow your STAR PLANT branches wherever you like. That meant that we ultimately had to drop AO, which we would only have been able to afford if pre-baked, in a static game world.
Although the palette expanded, I was determined to keep it focused so I kept a very tight control - in fact almost every colour in the game comes from just one single texture. I did this so that I could adjust the colours all at once and keep them unified.
Another big influence came from Wall-E and other Pixar films that rely on a lot of softly reflected light. Unlike ‘realistic’ games where you want to differentiate each surface and give them a unique feel, I wanted every surface in Grow Home to have the same soft, velvety look. This is where I reveal my ultimate SECRET ART WEAPON… our lead coder Andy Buck. Andy is an artist too and his background is in visual FX and shader trickery, and he wrote an amazing shader that does all of our Fresnel and time-of-day effects. This means that every surface accurately reflects the colour of the sky dome according to it’s angle, but only at acute angles with the camera so you get a lot of sophisticated looking rim-lighting, making everything look more solid and satisfying, as if reflecting bounced light from the surfaces around it. Without that effect it’s very difficult to read the shapes in the game which is a problem if the player can climb anywhere they want!
Add to that a time-of-day cycle that constantly changes the colour of the sky and another shader trick to look like the curvature of the planet as you climb higher and higher up through the clouds, and you have one great looking game ;)
As for the modelling, I wanted to make a strict distinction between BUD being mechanical and alien to the world, compared to all the organic plant and animal life that he discovers. So everything organic is made of tris and everything mechanical is made of quads. Quads are easy, but 3dsMAX can make it more challenging to work in tris since a lot of tools default to quads and automatically create hidden edges. I started most of my organic models with a simple geosphere, stretching and pulling them into the shape I wanted. I used a lot of noise, relax, optimise and twist modifiers. The hardest part is keeping the poly density consistent depending on the shape you’re making – making sure that every tri counts and is different enough from its neighbours. I found it’s also important to not be too fussy… the more you fine tune an organic low-poly model, the more it tends to look ‘designed’ and man-made.
Sorry for the essay, but I hope it helps! I’ve had a look at your site (great logo BTW) but can’t find anything about the game yet. I’d love to see if you have something ready to show :)
[JC]
Thanks for the *awesome* essay! I was not expecting this, and I really appreciate the detail you went into, it will surely be a huge help. Your initial inspiration comes from the exact same place as me, I agree in that I can get lost looking at their work for days... Although I've been looking even further back to people like Wenzel Jamnitzer and Lorenz Stoer. The accuracy of the geometry is simply fantastic! As of recent I've been looking at Rodrigo Oliveira as well, especially the character design.
It's interesting to know that the game-play has affected the design in such a way, I didn't expect that. For now my game is 'story driven' but will have certain elements that are similar such as the day/night cycle and of course soft lighting. There won't be procedural animation or anything quite so technical (I hope), being a currently two person team I'm not sure we have the time to get so deep. However if Andy wants to donate his shaders to a good cause... well it was worth a try!
I'm using Maya myself, but the process for my models has been similar and being fussy is also a problem. Maya also likes to add hidden edges, especially the double ones...
How embarrassing to look at my website. I didn't link it because it's so broken! I'm glad you like the logo though, it's got quite a fun story behind it so it's good to hear people like it.
I will absolutely hunt you down and show you the game when we get there, we're very new and I'm still in the process of setting things up. So far I have a few animations of an "inspired" character walking around a garden. Nothing much at all.
Again thank you, I'm stuck in work doing paper work desperate to get back into the game, so your post has made the day go slower. One more thing I'd like to ask is how are you building the game? Is it in an engine or something a bit more custom? (Edit - Just seen that it's Unity, which I use as well, excellent!)
All the best,
Josh
I love your references. My Dad is an Escher fan so I grew up with a few of his prints around the house, I’m sure that stuff all sinks into the subconscious :)
Yes, gameplay is king! Art direction is really important for catching people’s attention and selling the game - but without solid, clear game mechanics (and in your case a great story) you’re not going to keep people engaged so there are always compromises to be made. There are LOTS of limitations that help inform the style choice, like our tiny team size. I’m the only dedicated artist on the project and we’ve only had a few months to build the whole game, so that was another consideration for choosing a minimalist look. But you have to work WITH them and look for opportunities - I think we’ve managed to make something special.
Yes we’re using Unity and it’s been a great fit for us. Being able to drop PSDs and MAX files straight into the game is like a DREAM for a bit of an old timer like me (I’ve still got a copy of Delux Paint IV for the Amiga on my desk!)
All the best with your game. I’m sure it’ll be awesome and I can’t wait to see it. I'm in the middle of grabbing the next set of screenshots so we can show you more of ours... not long now til release!
Oh, and nice try about the shader ;)
[JC]
I was pretty much floored by this game, visually. I've been a huge fan of the low poly flat shaded look for ages, which MAY be because I'm not a great artist when it comes to texturing and my model shading tend to be all in the shader.
This game was kind of a proof of concept for a lot of "us" I think, who have an idea of how such a look can perform in a larger space, and how it does indeed fix some readability problems inherent to 3D graphics. For instance, I play a lot of flight simulators and the resolution of ground textures tends to be a tremendous issue: In the real world, a grassy field seen from the stratosphere is a fairly uniform blend of colors, but in games it tends to be more of a blotchy stretched mess. That resolution problem is almost impossible to overcome gameplay-wise when trying to spot a certain kind of object against a certain kind of background unless that object is specifically highlit, whereas in the real world the human eye finds such tasks of organic vs inorganic far simpler: It's been tempting to ask DCS World devs to offer a "pseudo-realistic" view of flat shaded terrain to overcome this limitation of texture resolution. I think the low poly look really drives home the scale of the environments being drawn in GH. It's so freaking good.
The game I'm working on is flat shaded/triangles/quads as well, and also in Unity, so when I saw this game knock it out of the park I was almost desperate to know more, especially how its shaders and lighting model are written. The way it copes with the day/night cycle is especially impressive: This game looks freaking spectacular no matter what time of day it is.
and I still think virtua fighter 1 virtua racing starfox snes 32x games look should come back. it was once a tech limt now it looks like some kind of strange computer abstract modern art
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJCOwBDUgfY
they brought it back 10 years ago with the virta 4 gameplay and I liked to play that more because of the music and the way it looked.
http://youtu.be/K4_-QYow1As
as for maya I model in 3dmax because of the better polygon tools but since 2014 maya they put some of the same tools that was in maz into maya now like the swift loop i like to make quads with.
i find 3dmax and maya Automatic convert quad to tri or reverse works well enough if the model is simple. in max it is in the newer graphite tools If I remember right?
http://youtu.be/DgjioOigaQA