These ships are painted by Blue using Substance painter -- well, overpainted by Blue. These were ships that she had previously painted in photoshop directly in a cel-shaded fashion, and which now she's overpainting to give it a mixed realistic look.
It's worth bearing in mind a couple of things:
- These are screenshots from Substance Painter, so it will look a bit different in Unity. See my recent videos on that subject.
- These have emissive parts on them, but that REALLY doesn't show up properly in the substance painter view, so you'll have to imagine that part for now. ;)
Autocannon Minipod
Old:
First revisions:
My main note on that was that it didn't feel beat-up enough, although beyond that I really love it. And, um... what a difference, right??
Newest:
Aww yiss, now we're talking.
Fighter
Old (although with some improvements that were overdue on the cel-shaded part):
New:
I just love the fighter, with how metal and beat-up it looks now. It should do particularly well in the in-game lighting and with the lightmaps on. :)
Armor Ship
Old:
New:
I also really love the metalness here, and the added details. I've asked about adding a variety of scorch marks on that, though. We could do a variety of smart masks and then make them black with a very high roughness and potentially low metalness and that effect happens easily.
Bomber
Old:
New:
Overall I really like the bomber, although it feels a bit too gleamy-shiny in some ways. Maybe having it a bit more worn of a metal as a base there is something we'll do -- or just introducing layers of wear. I love the scratches we have going on.
Eyebot
Old:
New:
The eyebot is perfect, I love that glassy look it has and how perfect it seems in a lot of ways. Really a different form of character to it, which is fantastic. :)
That's all for now!
Just thought I'd share a bit of the progress that is being made. Now I guess that our main problem is that these ships are drawn so bloody small in the battlefield -- relative to the camera -- that all that awesome detail is lost...
We'll figure it out. Someone on kickstarter was mentioning the same thing. Maybe the answer is smaller squads of larger ships, or using more verticality to fit larger ships in the same radius, or who knows. I don't want to shrink the feeling of scale of the game, but at the same time we want to be able to see more than just the icon-fest, at least when zoomed in.
