KickBack - Sprint 3

KickBack - Sprint 3

My name is Kyle Ramser, and I am currently working as a 3D Artist on the game KickBack. Kickback is a unique 3D platformer in which you use your pogo and shotgun legs to traverse a dream-like world. Our team just finished our third sprint, which further refined the movement mechanics and, on my side of things, implemented a lot more art and started the creation of the game world. I was able to finish a few more models, but the main focus of this sprint was UVing and texturing what I had already created. This sprint taught me a lot about texturing, since I’m working in a style I have never done before, but actually had very little problems or holdups.

Shown above are a few of the models I had to clean up. The reason varied, but many faces had multiple double extrusions or holes in the model that needed to be closed.

Starting off with the difficulties, since I had never worked with a painterly style texture before, I had to get used to the process of making one. The first texture that I did was a bit slow because of this, but once I got the hang of it, I was able to complete the others without much issue, and knew exactly what variations, filters, and colors to use to get the look I was going for. Because of this, I ended up learning a lot about creating a new art style that will be useful in future projects, especially now that painterly-styled games seem increasingly popular. The only other difficulty I had was that I had some modeling cleanup added to my plate after kickoff had already begun, so I had a few more cards than expected. This didn’t end up being a huge problem, though, and I was able to fix up a few of the models fairly quickly and move back to my original sprint cards.

With the short difficulties and learning experiences out of the way, I’ll move on to the process that I used for the textures and the cards that I was able to complete this sprint. I looked up a lot of tips early in the process to share with my team for making painterly textures, and it has been great to see them come in handy and help us achieve the style we were going for. For each of the textures, I used a base fill layer of whichever color the specific part of the model was supposed to be. After this, I would make light and dark fill layers, with whichever grunge map seemed to work best for the certain material I was working with, and use a blur slope filter to blend it into the base color. This achieved a paint splodge-esque look and really sold the hand-painted aesthetic. I would also add a very light fill color and use the curvature map to apply it to only the edges, as well as a dark color, for which I used the ambient occlusion map. Each of these added reflected sunlight and shadow, respectively, which made the texture look a lot more refined. I used this same method for all of the textures, removing layers or changing them as needed, and I am very happy with the results from this. I was able to complete the textures and UVs for the lamp post, water tower, connector, and pebbles, as well as two tiling textures for the Unity terrain, and a few model cleanups that I had talked about previously.

Tiling textures created for terrain.

So overall, this was likely the smoothest sprint yet, at least for me. The bumps in the road were minimal, and my designer and producer were on top of it at all times, giving feedback on my work and being very clear about what they wanted everything to look like. I had no idea until this project how much of a difference this makes, but knowing exactly what style and aesthetic is asked of you makes everything a lot smoother when creating a model or texture.