South of Midnight

For South of Midnight I was responsible for creating and managing the base texture library. These were later applied by the environment artists to the various levels in the game.
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When I started the production our Art Director, Whitney Clayton, already had a visual art direction established for what the materials should look like for the game. I worked with her to refine that look and direction further for the tiled materials used by the environment art team.
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The main pillars of the texturing process, was that it needed to look hand crafted, the details needed to be larger than human scale, and have warm and cool color blending. We needed to think about the surfaces and how would someone make a maquette of this assets. What materials or techniques would they use to make this asset. We ended up going for a stylized realism look for the surfaces in the game. One way we did this was added a lot of brush strokes to the surfaces. The materials had to look used and dirty as well. We did this through layered materials and decals. We were also limited on the number of textures that we could use, due to the fact that we were using lightmaps and baking for the game. So we had to develop different texture saving techniques to account for this.

The first material I worked on was the corrugated metal used for the trailer houses and the swamp shacks in the game. We wanted to make it look like they hade been hand painted but have the paint in the direction of the of the metal. There were three layers, the metal layer, rust layer and the paint layer. The blend was through the height map. This material incorporated the warm and cool color blending on the paint layer and through color tinting we would be able to reuse it through out the game.
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I worked with our Technical Artists and environment artists on some commonly used materials providing feedback and suggestions on what was needed to create the levels. I also assisted the Outsourcing Lead Emmanuel Pappas, with doing reviews and providing feedback for textures and materials that were done by our Outsourcing partners for our game. This included some vegetation, large scale props and tiled textures and materials.
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This was truly a collaborative project and we had a wonderful Eenvironment art team for this project. It was truly a joyful experience.
https://www.artstation.com/whitneyclayton
https://www.artstation.com/jamesarkwright

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https://www.artstation.com/ackmaster
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