CKIII Dev Diary #28 - Art Focus

[Carlberg]

Hello my name is Joacim, Art Lead on Crusader Kings 3, I am positing here a developer diary written by Pontus, Art Director on Crusader Kings 3, currently on paternity leave. Our artists will reply to your questions in the comments!

Art Focus
Hey! Let’s talk about the art of Crusader Kings III!

My name is Pontus, Art Director on CK3. I’ve written this dev diary together with the art team, and if you promise to tell everyone this is the best dev diary so far, there will be some sweet wallpapers at the end of it. Cool?

Certainly, you’ve seen a lot of the art already, in various states of completion, with all our diaries and previews. Let’s start by talking about the way we’ve approached creating the graphics for the game!

The starting point for the art direction is, as it should be, the game design. If you recall Dev Diary #0, Henrik Fåhreus’ vision of the game has a big focus on characters and storytelling, as well as approachability and player freedom. Reinforcing that through the art has been the main goal.

To keep ourselves on-track, three key pillars guide the art department on CK3:

A ROLE-PLAYING EXPERIENCE - This pillar is represented by our goal to give life to the characters and their unfolding stories. An example of this would be the characters’ portraits, we did not want them small and static, they are now front and center, and show off their standing or lack thereof through clothing, as well as show how they feel about what is happening to them through body language.

A MEDIEVAL GAME - We made a great effort to keep a good level of historical accuracy in our designs. Our illustrations and icons are made to reflect the time period, just like the 3D art that populate the map. Of course, sometimes we had to try and find good compromises in the designs that would work for the entire timespan of the game.

Where possible, we based clothes on reconstructed sewing patterns from extant medieval clothing. For example, we recreated the "coronation tunic" of Roger II of Sicily, a well preserved garment from the 1130s (though it was actually made some time after the coronation).

Another example would be a loading screen with some really well-painted sunflowers, but these did not exist in europe until the 16th century, which was spotted in time thanks to our Beta testers: so we sent it back to get the flowers repainted…

A ROUGH WORLD - Crusader Kings is not a game for all-ages, you live dangerously and people do terrible, terrible things to each other. This is reflected in the more somber palette and overall mood of the game.

Now, let’s talk about the different types of art you’ll have fun with in CK3:

CHARACTERS
I’m very excited about our new character portraits, and what we can do with them visually. They are varied and have lots of, well, character. Every day there’s a screenshot shared in the dev chat featuring someone they’ve encountered in-game, and we usually agree, yes, that person wears that hat better than most, or indeed, he looks just like the poster boy for the Deviant trait.

For me, the real test for the characters is if they make you feel, and It IS satisfying to throw especially smug-looking Rivals into your Dungeon, and you might feel a bit sorry for some harmless looking characters before you plot to have someone deliver poisonous snakes upon them.

I really want to stress the fantastic work our Lead Character Artist Nils Wadensten and the character team have done in bringing this new generation of portraits to our games, alongside our Engine team.

In fact, he’ll go into the character portraits a bit more in a future diary, hopefully he won’t show the first iterations of the wounds and diseases, some were a bit too much for a lot of people..

For now, I’ll leave you with a sneak peek of Concept art and the final piece of Clothing as how it appears in the game.

ANIMATION
Making the characters move was quite a challenge since the movements need to be very discreet, and not call too much attention to themselves as that could become a distraction from the gameplay.

The posing and idle animations are there to help the immersion and storytelling. Keeping the Rough World pillar in mind, they should not be silly and slapstick - while CK has some wonderful dark humor, we play it straight. I do think the look on a character's face when he realises they are locked up together with a Cannibal is appropriately shocked though.

Generally the characters have a pose that reflects their personality or the situation they’re in.

EVENTS
Here is where the role-playing really kicks in. When an event pops up, we showcase the characters involved and how they feel about the current proceedings, set against a backdrop that really helps sell the setting. This means if you encounter the same event in another play-through, the visuals might be quite different due to the characters involved.

The backdrops have a detailed but hand-painted style that complements our stylized characters’ well. In fact, we have some for you as wallpapers without text, icons and characters obscuring them, enjoy.

When we create a new event background, we also do a hand-crafted lighting setup, which relights the portraits to fit the current scene:

ILLUSTRATIONS
Besides the events, there’s plenty of illustrations in CK3!

For the loading screens, we wanted someone who can do images full of mood and storytelling, in a rough, painterly style. We went straight for the top and asked Craig Mullins. Fortunately, he was up for it, and has provided some really exciting imagery.

They all are of course showcasing aspects of the Crusader Kings experience- from Templars in battle to babies in peril!

Besides the loading screens and event backgrounds, we have cool paintings for Decision categories, terrain types, holdings, army movements, legacies… heck, our Personality trait icons and Tenets are small illustrations - there is a lot to discover and keep you entertained and immersed!

The Holding Illustrations make for great wallpapers as well, so we included that in our art drop!

UNITS
Our units are really cool! We were very enthusiastic about these, and really added quite a bit of detail. Let us know if you spot the nails that stick the shield handle into the shield at the back.

The units’ appearance is based on culture - We have Western European, Byzantine, Middle-east / North Africa, Pagans, Indian and Turko-Mongol.

A unit has three visual tiers, becoming more armor-clad and sophisticated as it progresses. So it was important for us to make sure a Tier 2 Byzantine looks equally as tough as a Tier 2 Turko-Mongol for instance.

They have a lot of spark to them as we added a lot of different animations, they cheer when they win, bang their shields during sieges and we make use of red liquid particles when they land some nice hits.

Culture, Tiers and Coat-of-arms colors and emblems make the Units look appropriate and unique. Here’s some examples:

HOLDINGS
The Holdings were quite a challenge, they needed to be a certain size based on maximum zoom level and minimum Barony size. Since they are small they need to have strong, readable shapes without looking like toys.

Their appearances are influenced by the region they are found in, in this case Western European, Mediterranean, India and Middle-east.

Similar to Units, they have visual tiers, tied to the Holding’s Upgrade level. Temples and Cities have two tiers, whereas Castles and Walls have four tiers.

Of course, we have primitive huts as well, and a big bunch of unique buildings, some easier to recreate (Pyramids) than others (Charlemagne's Palace).

MAP
There’s a rumor going around that some of you CK2 players rarely look at the terrain map. We didn’t want that for CK3, so we made our map to not only be moody and pretty to look at, but also more useful, so you’d have more reasons to go there.

CK is information heavy, so we try to make sure that everything in the terrain map serves a function, and is easy to see. Thus a cleaner look, to make sure the icons, borders, text and 3D models that sit on top of the land read well. At a glance, you should be able to see what terrain type a Barony has without consulting another map mode.

If you are into Political Map modes though, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. You’ll notice it feels familiar.

It seems our Paper map has been received well, we’re glad you like lobsters too! Getting the right amount of sea-monsters without making it look cluttered wasn’t easy, but I think we managed in the end.

UI
A PDS game has a lot of UI. It is something made in close collaboration with UX and Game Design departments. It is constantly iterated upon and is one of the most challenging aspects of our games.
Visually we took inspiration from game design’s character focus pillar and pulled in visual influences from Roleplaying games. To make it approachable we tried to keep it clean, and give everything some breathing room.

We use a lot of illustrations in our UI’s to help immersion and flavor, and we have a cool system where some of the image types are context sensitive, so for instance your Sultan will not stand in front of a western European throne room if he is hanging out in the Middle-east, and if you are dealing with Catholicism in Religion View, well you’ll see churches and similar imagery.


Coats of Arms
Heraldry is essential to the medieval immersion of Crusader Kings, and so heralds will be excited to hear that we have totally overhauled the Coat of Arms system.

We started from scratch, poring over history books and contemporary armorials to ensure every detail is authentic. We designed accurate CoA for over a thousand titles and dynasties to complement a new scriptable random system that weights hundreds of unique elements based on culture, religion, and everything in between. We modeled minute differences across regions, so frequencies of designs and tinctures are different in Germany, France, and Spain. The amount of possible combinations? Millions.

We achieved our primary goal of making our feudal European heraldry as accurate as possible, but we didn't stop there—we wanted to go into extra depth for all regions. For example, the eastern hordes decorate the Great Steppe with their special tamgha emblems, while the Islamic world is fleshed out with immersive Saracenic heraldry (no more endless stars and crescents). Emergent cadet houses differentiate their new arms by quartering, and yes, England's coat of arms will change if William wins the Norman Invasion.

Here’s some examples of the heraldry system in action - firstly how England’s arms can react to gameplay, and secondly a selection of randomly-generated COA from around the world.

In summary:

The art team has worked very hard and it is a delight every day to see whatever new stuff is coming in. Making games is a group effort though, so we get invaluable help and feedback from the rest of the team: code, design, QA, sound, production all contribute as well.

Of course, seeing pictures in a dev diary is one thing, we can’t wait for you to get your hands on the full experience! As always, your feedback will help guide us as we continue to make content and improvements for CK3!

And for being good sports and reaching the end of the dev diary, here's links to some sweet wallpapers!

http://forumcontent.paradoxplaza.com/public/paradox/banners/ck3-wallpapers.zip

http://forumcontent.paradoxplaza.com/public/paradox/banners/ck3-map-wallpapers.zip

 

[NilsW]

Cool.
Question: do characters portraits change if they become fat or malnourished, or if ladies become pregnant?

Yes, yes and yes.

 

[NilsW]

And could you tell some more about children's and growing up portraits? From what I've seen, they are almost great but for the toddlers (they seem a bit a mini-me in some of the screenshots....)

There will be another dev diary focusing on the portraits specifically where I will go into details on aging and many of the other features in the portrait system.

Also, I find that light eyes sometimes give the impression of the character being blind. Are wou aware of the issue?

Yes this issue is known and has been fixed.

 

[Carlberg]

Updated original post with Youtube videos as the forum was being a bit cranky with the video.

I know this won't be added before release. But I hope you guys consider adding actual growing cities on to the map, some time in the future. Really big castles shouldn't stand alone, and large cities shouldn't have a tiny thing in the middle of a holding to represent them.

I just feel like the map looks a bit empty, right now.

To whom is this a good representation of Constantinople? It looks like it could be anywhere.

Overall good stuff, I do wish the Holdings had more variety by region and that there was some sprawl as they grew in size.

I think devs chose to describe holding like that because of visbility of holding type and terrain. But that constantinople looks quite small though. Maybe put some small buildings around wall will be better?

When making the holdings for the base game our main focus was on making sure that they were easily readable and a clear sense of progression could be seen over time. For release we aren't including a building sprawls system, but we have heard the feedback and we have people in the project that are keen to see the sprawl make a return. So while it wont make it in for release, we may see it come back in the future to help show the growth of provinces.

Is there cavalry unit model too? It will be so weird if mongolian hordes unit model is only infantry. And i wanna see mounted knights and cataphract too!

What about cavalry unit models?

There are no cavalry unit models at release, but we dont rule it out that might be something we add in the future.

 

[Carlberg]

Thanks for the reply. As I said in the post before, I'm quite disappointed that unit graphics are not differentiated by unit types. Hope you can make it in the future, if it work as a DLC I will also buy it without any doubt.

BTW, is "Carlberg" and "Joacim" the same person?

Indeed, I'm Joacim Carlberg, because I'm super creative when it comes to usernames

 

[Carlberg]

I don't understand religious holdings for non-christians.

It represents mosque? Temple? But why would it be outside a city?

If it's the image I think you're referencing Its a slightly more special temple.

Mecca - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Carlberg]

I hope the illness / injury portrayals aren't too toned down, but I understand wanting it to not be completely repulsive

I dont think anyone with strong trypophobia will be playing with it on, i'll say that much.

 

[SaintDaveUK]

While the coat of arms look amazing, will something be done about certain shileds just cuttin off animal parts or other symbol parts and all of them being generaly offcenter? iirc when it came to animals and other symbols, the "cadet" dynasty or new town just shifted them to side instead of cutting them up
View attachment 581807

Those cantons obscuring the charges are actually based directly on some historical references, mostly English and Norman. Here's a real example of the Sharingbourne arms from the Powell Roll (c. 1348).

Good spot with the frame being offcentre. I'll take a look at what is causing it

How flexible is the heraldic system going to be. Will it change my coat of arms when I manage to unite the Kingdoms of England and Bohemia. Will this be represented in the coat of arms when I form the Anglobohemian empire?

From footage/screenshots of preview builds I hoped that the game had a simple dynamic CoA system. If you would own two titles of the same tier, you would have a quartered CoA, with the CoA of the first title in the upper left and lower right quarters, and the CoA of the second title in the upper right and lower left. Maybe even expand it that it shows each CoA in a quarter if you hold 4 same-tier titles.

From this dev diary I understand that this is not the case, and that CoA's only change under specific, scripted circumstances. For example: William conquering England, but also when Castile and Leon are united (got that from preview footage). But when Castile is united with, let's say, Poland,no such dynamic changes would take place.

Am I wrong here and did I completely misunderstand? If not, I really hope that a system as described above is added in a future update.

We do have dynamic quartering for cadet dynasties, but for realms/titles we played it safe and only made a handful of historical examples ready for release. It's entirely possible that it's something we could expand on in the future though.

Just one question though, will there be an ingame CoA editor at launch, like with the ck2 ruler designer DLC?

No fancy editor at launch, unfortunately. The script that drives our CoA is really powerful though, and it's what we use in-house, so it will be possible to make some really nice stuff if you take the time to learn it.

Will our family CoA be editable? And if so, will we be able to do proper quartering or will it all be a fixed image like in CK2? Because in CK2 if we tried to impale a CoA, they would cut the image in half and put one half of one image and the other half of the other, instead of showing both images in full but resized into the two halves. Quartering suffered the same problem in CK2. Proper quartering would be as is seen in the image you showed of the Kingdom of England with the three lions quartered with the fleur-de-lis of France. You notice the images are not cut through, but "miniatures" of themselves each in their own corner. Will this be replicable?

As cadet dynasties branch off, they will combine 4 miniature CoA in the way you described.

Would the seperate charges (those little figures inside the CoA, like the lion and the fleur-de-lis) be placeable in the CoA or are these images fixed like in CK2? Could I for example decide to make a CoA that is two fleurs-de-lis and a mullet, with the two fleurs-de-lis on top and the mullet at the bottom? How editable are the CoA?

Very editable! The textures are simply raw elements (e.g. a lion or a cross) and then we position and colour them in script. Here's how you might script your example (it's not actually Python, but that makes nice formatting on the forums!):

e_bjorn = {
    pattern = "pattern_solid.tga"
    color1 = "blue" # the background is solid blue
    
    colored_emblem = {
        texture = "ce_fleur.dds" # we have two yellow fleur-de-lis at the top...
        color1 = "yellow"
        color2 = "yellow"
        instance = { position = { 0.33 0.33 } scale = { 0.5 0.5 }  } # top left, half size
        instance = { position = { 0.67 0.33 } scale = { 0.5 0.5 }  } # top right, half size
    }   
    
    colored_emblem = {
        texture = "ce_star_05_pierced.dds" # ...and a single white and red star at the bottom
        color1 = "white"
        color2 = "red"
        instance = { position = { 0.50 0.67 } scale = { 0.5 0.5 }  } # bottom, half size
    }   
}

 

[SaintDaveUK]

Can you clarify why you have "pagans" listed as a culture group here?
There are different groups of pagans scattered all over the map, including inside some of the cultures you specifically mention as having their own unit models.

It doesn't entirely make sense for all of them to look the same, and since it's quite easy to end up with Western European cultured pagans (via Norse shenanigans), there's a conflict as to which models make sense.

You are right, "pagans" isn't the most accurate name here as it isn't actually tied to religions, it's just a name we have used internally. It's more of a "Northern European" unit set, and is used by cultures like Norwegian, Lithuanian, and Finnish.

 

[Carlberg]

Will we be able do import our own art in the form of hairstyles, clothes, CoA emblems, icons and buildings? If so, how hard would it be, and would it be Ironman compatible?

I'm always on about Norway, but can you tell if its CoA is gonna use the golden lion with an axe and a crown - even if pagan? Historically that CoA didn't come into use until the 13th century, and the axe and crown represents a Norwegian christian saint, supposedly from the Yngling dynasty. I don't know what kind of CoA it would use otherwise, but it's just anachronistic to have in the bookmarks 867 and 1066.
Not to mention a little weird if the Yngling dynasty uses the same CoA as Norway and the king is not an Yngling. Perhaps the Ynglings should use a different CoA this time around?

Lastly, sometime ago I asked about the subject of applying dynastic CoAs to newly created titles so that new kingdoms won't use an arbitrary pre-fixed CoAs that may represent a different dynasty. Would it be possible to add as a function?

Ironman compatability I'm uncertain of, but the 3D assets have been successfully modded by people working on Imperator mods, and it's pretty much the same system we have here, just with some more functionality. (I:R characters are more static). CoA emblems should be pretty easy to mod, same with icons and map buildings. The map itself we have the map editor for and it has seen a lot of improvement since I:R released.

As for the Norweigan CoA it might very well be using the later 'christian' CoA. It's tricky to find proper CoA and symbolisms to use from countries pre-history/pre-founding. But if a good case can be made, or better yet, an obscure but reliable source found, then that's a possible reason for us updating it in the future.

 

[SaintDaveUK]

You talked about immersive Saracenic heraldry. Did they use heraldry? I tought it's just an european thing for dynasties. Can you show them please?

Heraldry and heraldry-like designs from the medieval Islamic world were reasonably common. We used a bunch of different sources, but this one is a pretty good start and has some interesting pictures in the first pages (requires a sign-up). New Considerations on Mamluk Heraldry - Paul Balog

Here's another image I found that has some good examples.

Will we be able do import our own art in the form of hairstyles, clothes, CoA emblems, icons and buildings? If so, how hard would it be, and would it be Ironman compatible?

The Clausewitz Maya Exporter (also comes packaged with Photoshop exporter) is available for download here. It's the same tool we use to get stuff in game. It might be a bit tricker without the source files for animations, but modders, uh, find a way.

Historically that CoA didn't come into use until the 13th century, and the axe and crown represents a Norwegian christian saint, supposedly from the Yngling dynasty. I don't know what kind of CoA it would use otherwise, but it's just anachronistic to have in the bookmarks 867 and 1066.

The same is true for almost every title and dynasty in the game. Heraldry as we know it only took off in the 1200s, but the lion/axe Norwegian arms appear in some of the earliest armorials (see pic). It's almost impossible to find anything that has a reliable claim to being the symbol of a European realm before armorials like this.

Lastly, sometime ago I asked about the subject of applying dynastic CoAs to newly created titles so that new kingdoms won't use an arbitrary pre-fixed CoAs that may represent a different dynasty. Would it be possible to add as a function?

Some cultures currently do that already but it also changes the name of the realm (for example Seljuk or Abbassid). It would be an interesting idea to expand that to give players and modders some more options.

 

[Carlberg]

Yes. If we assume he meant those three it still leaves a big question about all of the Slavic nations... I’d guess a DLC. :/

And for now we’d get Slavs lumped together with Northern while pagan and Western Europe when Christian.

Slavs, Norse, Finns will be sharing a wardrobe, so will the Germans, French and Brits. If they can get along with that I hope the north & eastern Europeans can get along as well We have taken care though to make the designs not be too distinct in either direction though, clothing and armor shared a lot of similarities in the area.

Would we be seeing stuff like coat of arms on clothes? Especially things like armour?

We currently use the coat of arms on shields to help differentiate armies. You can see that on the original post

 

[Carlberg]

In one Review video I saw the tooltip and it basically said that quality of the army is calculated by how good the units that make up the army, poor units like levy = low quality. Army with much of it being made up of expensive men at arms and knights = high quality.

Thanks. That makes sense and it fits better with how the army models change with each tier.

Yep, that is correct. The higher the quality the army is, the higher the tier of unit is shown. So an army with the highest tier but that is outnumbered by another army, showing a first tier levy unit, may still punch stronger than it's mere number of men shows. A levy army should fear a knight army that might also have leadership and terrain in their favor.

 

[NilsW]

The African clothing in the screenshot reminds me of Civilization's depiction of Shaka of the Zulus (see below), which is kinda weird as it's sort of like making the Byzantines look like half naked painted Gaulish warriors.

Hopefully this will be rectified in the future, it would be odd to see a Mansa Musa equivalent walking around half naked with only some "tribal" animal furs and feathers on.

I just want to clarify that the outfit depicted in the screenshot is for African pagan shamans and will not be used by Muslims or people of other religions.