Material Art Direction

Images in this post are coming from the material art direction document I build with the help of the team. Thanks to Ubisoft Québec for this great project.

Snipset of the fantastic work the whole Material Team did. Art done by Caroline Couture, Claude Gosselin, Dimitri Alexis, Olivier Trehet, Pierre Fleau, Jimmy Malachier, Technicolor and myself.

Early Tests and Benchmarks to identify the vibe and process for the game. Art done by Ashley Sparling, Pierre Fleau, Jimmy Malachier and myself.

Early Tests and Benchmarks to identify the vibe and process for the game. Art done by Pierre Fleau, Jimmy Malachier and myself.

The very first material I did to sell the painterly style.

Here are the Material Artistic pilar everyone followed on the production to stay consistent.

Pilar 1, Reduce Color Palette, strong but efficeint colors playing with classical color harmonies.

Pilar 2, the painterly vibe, better to strong than not enough, it was often our main focus.

Pilar 3, Non Continuous Shapes, it the idea than no detail should be continuous and close shapes. The eye should always be able to circulate at different speeds.

Pilar 4, Shapes Redraw, when painting in a losely manner you will often lost some shapes between smudges areas. You need to do a quick pass to redraw some element without beeing too rigid.

Pilar 5 and 6, Opaque Modeling on Aquatic Underlayer. Like if we painted with poster color, do a first pass really smudgy then go back on top with sharper area like some dry brush strokes.

Pilar 7, Low Painterly Normal, to avoid a 3d feeling we tone done our intensity and also apply a painterly feeling to this texture.

Pilar 8, Mat glossiness, to achieve a more pictural look we volontary tuned down most of our glossines to create a mat image.

Color Palette example, monochromatic.

Color Palette example, analoguous.

Color Palette example, square color palette.

Example of material layering I did for the benchmark, heavily inspired by the Spirited Away road before the Red Entrance.

Example of mask for this material for Hephaisto I did, inspired by Minoan architecture mixed with ghibli rounded esthetic.

An another example I did to explain the shapes rythm in the base color. You can understand the hierarchy between the colors by looking at the sizes of the masks.

A fantastic tool done by Pierre Fleau to give a painterly effect.

A little watercolor filter I did to create the underlayer we were looking for.

Some tools for brush strokes work.

Overview of the possible workflow, we didn't only worked in Designer, as usual efficiency was our motto.

Example of final vs placeolder pass for the Hephaistos Kit I did.

Little snipset of my planning, it's not all about susbtance graphs. Planning and anticipating the needs of everyone was really awesome on this production.

An example of a generic kit for the ruin house I did.

A little Wip of the entrance of Hephaistos region from Athena region. Still one of my favorite shot.