Ken's Sandbox

Asset Creation Evolved…

Oct 2014

R+D Blog | Jan 2015 | Sep 2014

Sunset Overdrive is Out!

28/10/14 14:35

Sunset Overdrive is out!

I worked on this game from the very beginning, through all of its twists, turns, and re-boots. I learned a lot on the project. It forced a lot of painful, but positive growth at the studio, as this was by far the largest project the studio had ever taken on. Early on we had aggressive goals for number of characters on screen and the size and detail of the world. This forced us to consider new ways of working.

I did a lot of R&D on this project in several areas, from level creation to look dev and heavy NPR rendering techniques.

This project drove me to explore and begin to learn Houdini, and really think about what future game productions could look like. It changed my path, and I am very thankful for that.

Sunset_Overdrive_Art_by_Vasili_Zorin_mini

Tool : Procedural Tint mask Substance v0.1

17/10/14 08:26

With the amount of customization that happens in games now, in any genre, there is a ton of tint masks that need to be generated by artists. This tools aim was to automate the generation of these masks. I start by taking the final colour maps, find the Albedo by removing shading and lighting info as best I can. I then identify the 3 dominant colours of the map. This test is a fairly worst case scenario where most colours in the texture are in the same family so the gamut is small.

Adaptive Pixelization

16/10/14 06:57

This Substance analyses an image and adaptively pixelates it. The image is rendered at three different rates of pixilation. Then, based on the contrast between the neighbouring pixels, a large, medium, or fine pixel size is chosen to describe that area of the image.

Adaptive pixelization of details