Developing the style

There is a difference between stylised 3D and hand painted 3D, and I got lost.

My work/life balance this semester has been unbalanced recently. More life than work which is the opposite of what happened last semester. Last semester, I would really bunker down and work for 4 -5 and sometimes 6 days a week on specific work or problems and be completely focused. Now with more happening in life I would work for a few days, then need to go do something else for 4 or 5 days to then return to university work being like huh what was I working on again? And this is how I lost sight of my style.

Stylised assets are usually created from a high poly being baked onto a low poly in Substance Painter which allows the use of generators with curvature maps etc that are key to the style. Hand painted stylisation can miss this entire step. Using only the low poly and you create the depth painting by hand. You only need the low poly for shadow shapes.

My village house asset sat for a while with many bake problems after I created the high poly. The bake never worked despite all the settings I troubleshooted with. I then went to Bristol for 4 days and returned to still having all these problems sending me into a rut about my work.

Motivation for the project was lost and I struggled to make myself do the work. I found that if I woke up early and sat with a good breakfast while editing some old photographs, took years ago when I was more into photography, I’d wake myself up with a more thoughtful and creative mindset and be ready for the workday.

From one of my morning sessions.

One day I took a career day instead and surprisingly found my style again. Whilst looking at some work I came across The Line Animation who do some really fun 2D work. I was looking at one animation in particular called ‘Everything I can See From Here’ and was like “Hold on, I’m meant to be doing that”. And deleted my bad bake file, imported the house model into painter and started again.

I started with the look of the wolf head which I had the most fun doing.

I tried some Norse pattern on the front X and used my painted ship asset from semester 1 as a wood and colour reference, but decided that it made it too busy.

Then I based out the rest of the colours and painted for 3 days.

For the roof I had made a PBR in designer which I don’t like and made before my style crisis.

When I added it to the roof for the hand painted version, I added a slope blur filter on it and added more browns on it so that it would blend with the surrounding wood shapes.

Slope Blur filter

I had another texture that I had made in designer for the base of the building but had accidently got carried away and made it very realistic.

Instead of fixing it, because the style was different, I decided to make a lined mat with a tile sampler. I used it as a straight line guide and scale for painting the wooden planks and applied it to different parts of the building.

It worked very well.

This is the final asset: