Understanding “Style”
“The significant difference between realism and stylization is that with realism you are restricted to making things look ‘real’ while enhancing their visual language. With stylization you are free to play with the shapes and colours, exaggerate or remove details to enhance the look and feel in any direction.” [1]
“Stylization refers to a visual depiction, which represents an object without a full attempt and accurate representation of an object’s realistic appearance. This can include simplifications in shape, lines, colour, pattern, surface details, functionality and relationship to other objects in a scene.” [1]
Over Exaggerated Stylisation:
This form of stylisation focuses primarily on shape and silhouette, focusing on larger details and shapes. Exaggerating an object's shape and removing details, depending on the importance of what the asset aims to convey.
Examples: “Overwatch” [2] and “Ratchet and Clank” [3]
Stylised:
Picking and choosing what features of an asset are needed to translate the function/ purpose/ usage of said asset and determining how to manipulate said asset knowing this. Such as; exaggerating scale and shape or removing components of the asset (such as electrical line insulators [shown above]).
This also works in relation to how far away the asset is to the player, removing features that won't be seen or exaggerating them, so they can be seen.
Minimalistic Stylisation:
Playing on simplicity, minimalistic stylisation uses few details in style and shape, focusing on conveying an asset's purpose and function. While stripping it of detail, these assets usually only use albedo and no normals.
Examples: “Journey”[4] and ”Firewatch”[5]
Realistic to Stylised:
“When looking at the reference picture I tend to look for larger shapes first, then medium, small and micro-surface details. What are the characteristics of this asset? What would differentiate a realistic one from a stylised one is the detailing and texture? Defining the characteristics of an asset helps in the creation of both a realistic look and stylised look. By pinpointing the required details you are able to recreate them to mimic life likeness but also to know what details that might be enhanced or changed in stylisation.” [1]
“The [below] render showcases the same wood stump, but with only Albedo input and an unlit material. Most of the medium, small and micro-surface details are only visible through a viewport with scene lighting due to the light information and depth from the normal, gloss and specular input combined with the light source, which is lost when removing these inputs.
As mentioned earlier, in PBR you leave the albedo flat with only colour information as highlights and shadows are added by the rendering engine. When comparing the albedo maps it’s noticeable that I added highlights and shadows to the albedo for the stylised wood stump. In stylisation, you are free to enhance details such as adding highlights and crevices in the texture to emphasise depth. This is a style choice and you shouldn’t be afraid of experimenting by adding details as long as it won’t break the lighting when placed in the scene. PBR serves as guidelines and is not by any means set rules, there are different methods for PBR and the input varies in all engines. It’s easy to forget that these are not set rules, and as an artist, you have the artistic freedom to enhance and emphasise elements in your work.”[1]
“Battle Bay’s” Style
Taking inspiration from: Fortnite [6], World of Warcraft [7], Niko Gesell [8], Overwatch [9] and Jessica Dinh [10]
BattleBay's style is rather unique, as it doesn't quite conform fully to any category of stylisation. The silhouettes of our assets mimic realistic shapes, with a hint of exaggeration, their details are simplified or lost, in terms of topology. Later on, these details are reintroduced within the texturing stage, the texturing is extremely high in detail, but stylised in aesthetic, straying from a minimalistic look. We don't use any PBR (metalness, roughness, specular, etc.), the only maps primarily used are albedo and opacity. Any further "effects" are controlled by shaders within engine, to create lighting which supports our chosen style (Toon/ Cell Shader).
There are some exemptions to said style choices. While trying to stick to an somewhat un-exaggerated silhouette, sometimes it's a necessity. As certain objects can look mundane without said exaggeration. For example, the hero asset, the bamboo cannon; held by the tribal player.
Adjusting Assets To Our Style
Apply the assets pre-existing textures through the shader editor. SHIFT+A; add a lattice, and use align tools (or manually align it) to surround the asset with the lattice.
Assign a “Lattice” modifier to the asset, and assign the target object as the lattice, within said modifier. With the lattice selected, access the lattice menu – where you can edit the lattice resolution. Within edit mode, with the lattice selected, you can quickly edit the overall shape, silhouette and proportion of the asset
Various examples, quickly made through the use of a lattice:
Foliage
As stated beforehand, our foliage will follow a similar style as Jessica Dinhs, see below for various breakdowns:
References