Hello again Mechwarriors. Marco Mazzoni here, back to talk about my favorite topic: ‘Mechs.
Last week I talked a bit about what it took to bring the Bull Shark into the game, and in this post I’m going to go over what went into the art side of bringing the other 9 classic ‘Mechs back to BATTLETECH. If you’re interested in the game design aspect of this, you should check out Heavy Metal’s Lead designer, Ryan Burell’s excellent series of posts here, here, and here.
Since 7 of these mechs are a major selling point of this paid expansion, I wanted them to look their absolute best. We determined that one of the more efficient ways of doing this without breaking the already established style of the base game is with the textures.
Base Textures
As an example, here’s what I started with as a base for the Marauder. As you can see, it’s pretty much a blank slate at this point. There are actually a few reasons why we don’t use all of the texture information from PGI’s models. For one, we’ve found they simply don't read well with the distance that our game camera plays at. The other reason, and this is important to me, is because adding our own little touches lets us feel more connected to our work. If you’re not enjoying your work, no one else will either.
This is actually missing the normal map, but I add that before the next step
From here I take screenshots of that base model into Photoshop and start painting in the textures. All of the ‘Mechs in our game have a base texture treatment that includes heavy volumes of rust and surface battle damage. I love that this makes them look like they’ve already gone through several generations of war, but it can have the side effect of hiding some of the more defining features that sets these machines apart from one another. We can be more deliberate in how we apply the wear and aging effects by pushing all the dirt and grime into the edges and corners of the panels.
These sheets always have notes and production markings to make our goals clear for the contract texture artists
Special Cases
As you can see, I made a special call-out to change the cockpit canopy from glass to metal. This is a call back to the original design that only had one small forward facing cockpit panel. Modifying the geometry of these models was a bit out of scope for this release, but since we have full control over the textures, I wanted to take advantage of that to make a few personal tweaks to make a nod to the original designs.
The other ‘Mech we modified was the Assassin. There’s always been some debate as to whether the dome on top is cockpit glass or some kind of blacked out sensor suite. I personally always saw it looking like the rubberized black material on ED-209’s sensor dome, so I wanted to represent that take here.
I’m with Ryan here, I love the look of this ‘Mech
Taking a cue from some of my favorite mini painting techniques, I gave all of the new ‘Mechs tinted cockpit glass. I think the black glass on our standard mechs looks great up close, but it doesn’t have a whole lot of impact at a distance. Here’s the full set (minus the Bull Shark, you can check that one out in last week’s dev diary)
Most of these are unequiped at this stage, as we didn’t have the exact loadouts locked down until later in the process and I wanted to avoid any confusion when handing these over to our contract artists.
Here’s how it looks on the model.
The Marauder as it’s never been seen before!
Paint Schemes
Once the base textures were all on track, I was free to focus on the paint schemes. I try to cover as many different themes as I can for each ‘Mech so the player can maintain a theme throughout their company (camo, stripes, organic, blocky etc.)
Some patterns, like Phantomas, are repeated across different mechs
I did a lot of these...
Seriously though… I love this part!
And here’s how they look on the model.
Mech Viewer
So now that we have all these shiny new ‘Mechs looking their best, we need a way to show them off. Up until this point I’ve had an incredibly difficult time recognizing the paint schemes I’m applying to my ‘Mechs… which is unfortunate because I designed most of them! Something I’ve always wanted in this game is a better way to appreciate my collection. Thankfully, I wasn’t alone here. Our UI/UX Lead, Erik Fleuter, already had some gears going for how we can solve this.
This is a rough mock-up that he made early on that they didn’t get a chance to implement.
Using that as a jumping off point, I made my own quick mock-up of what I thought this could look like. The two main things that I wanted was to change the camera to at least one more angle from a more top-down perspective so I could get a better representation of what I’d be seeing on the battlefield, and the ability to spin my ‘Mech in place. Thankfully around this time I noticed a mod was out there that already did that last part, so I pointed it out to our tools engineer Chis Eck, and he had our own version of it hooked up in no time. All we had to do was tune the rotation speed and add some audio and that part was good to go.
It cluttered up the main mechbay screen a bit too much, so we kept everything to the “refit” screen, but you’re free to spin that ‘Mech anytime!
Now I should point out that this feature was actually out of scope for what we were initially planning for 1.8 and Heavy Metal, so another round of thanks to Mitch for letting us squeeze this in. Feature creep is dangerous but I think this risk paid off. It really adds to the ‘Mech collecting experience and I catch myself spending far more time in the Argo spinning “mechs and taking screenshots.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you haven’t played the Heavy Metal Flashpoint mini-campaign and don’t want anything spoiled, you should skip past this next part.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ok, it’s safe and spoiler free now...and that’s all I have for this round. Thanks again for reading and playing our game!
Just for the hell of it, here’s a bonus gif of the Heavy Metal key art to show the process.
Steps: thumbnail, sketch, 3D blockout, paintover, paintover, paintover, done. And one more paintover...
Last week I talked a bit about what it took to bring the Bull Shark into the game, and in this post I’m going to go over what went into the art side of bringing the other 9 classic ‘Mechs back to BATTLETECH. If you’re interested in the game design aspect of this, you should check out Heavy Metal’s Lead designer, Ryan Burell’s excellent series of posts here, here, and here.
Since 7 of these mechs are a major selling point of this paid expansion, I wanted them to look their absolute best. We determined that one of the more efficient ways of doing this without breaking the already established style of the base game is with the textures.
Base Textures
As an example, here’s what I started with as a base for the Marauder. As you can see, it’s pretty much a blank slate at this point. There are actually a few reasons why we don’t use all of the texture information from PGI’s models. For one, we’ve found they simply don't read well with the distance that our game camera plays at. The other reason, and this is important to me, is because adding our own little touches lets us feel more connected to our work. If you’re not enjoying your work, no one else will either.
This is actually missing the normal map, but I add that before the next step
From here I take screenshots of that base model into Photoshop and start painting in the textures. All of the ‘Mechs in our game have a base texture treatment that includes heavy volumes of rust and surface battle damage. I love that this makes them look like they’ve already gone through several generations of war, but it can have the side effect of hiding some of the more defining features that sets these machines apart from one another. We can be more deliberate in how we apply the wear and aging effects by pushing all the dirt and grime into the edges and corners of the panels.
These sheets always have notes and production markings to make our goals clear for the contract texture artists
Special Cases
As you can see, I made a special call-out to change the cockpit canopy from glass to metal. This is a call back to the original design that only had one small forward facing cockpit panel. Modifying the geometry of these models was a bit out of scope for this release, but since we have full control over the textures, I wanted to take advantage of that to make a few personal tweaks to make a nod to the original designs.
The other ‘Mech we modified was the Assassin. There’s always been some debate as to whether the dome on top is cockpit glass or some kind of blacked out sensor suite. I personally always saw it looking like the rubberized black material on ED-209’s sensor dome, so I wanted to represent that take here.
I’m with Ryan here, I love the look of this ‘Mech
Taking a cue from some of my favorite mini painting techniques, I gave all of the new ‘Mechs tinted cockpit glass. I think the black glass on our standard mechs looks great up close, but it doesn’t have a whole lot of impact at a distance. Here’s the full set (minus the Bull Shark, you can check that one out in last week’s dev diary)
Most of these are unequiped at this stage, as we didn’t have the exact loadouts locked down until later in the process and I wanted to avoid any confusion when handing these over to our contract artists.
Here’s how it looks on the model.
The Marauder as it’s never been seen before!
Paint Schemes
Once the base textures were all on track, I was free to focus on the paint schemes. I try to cover as many different themes as I can for each ‘Mech so the player can maintain a theme throughout their company (camo, stripes, organic, blocky etc.)
Some patterns, like Phantomas, are repeated across different mechs
I did a lot of these...
Seriously though… I love this part!
And here’s how they look on the model.
Mech Viewer
So now that we have all these shiny new ‘Mechs looking their best, we need a way to show them off. Up until this point I’ve had an incredibly difficult time recognizing the paint schemes I’m applying to my ‘Mechs… which is unfortunate because I designed most of them! Something I’ve always wanted in this game is a better way to appreciate my collection. Thankfully, I wasn’t alone here. Our UI/UX Lead, Erik Fleuter, already had some gears going for how we can solve this.
This is a rough mock-up that he made early on that they didn’t get a chance to implement.
Using that as a jumping off point, I made my own quick mock-up of what I thought this could look like. The two main things that I wanted was to change the camera to at least one more angle from a more top-down perspective so I could get a better representation of what I’d be seeing on the battlefield, and the ability to spin my ‘Mech in place. Thankfully around this time I noticed a mod was out there that already did that last part, so I pointed it out to our tools engineer Chis Eck, and he had our own version of it hooked up in no time. All we had to do was tune the rotation speed and add some audio and that part was good to go.
It cluttered up the main mechbay screen a bit too much, so we kept everything to the “refit” screen, but you’re free to spin that ‘Mech anytime!
Now I should point out that this feature was actually out of scope for what we were initially planning for 1.8 and Heavy Metal, so another round of thanks to Mitch for letting us squeeze this in. Feature creep is dangerous but I think this risk paid off. It really adds to the ‘Mech collecting experience and I catch myself spending far more time in the Argo spinning “mechs and taking screenshots.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you haven’t played the Heavy Metal Flashpoint mini-campaign and don’t want anything spoiled, you should skip past this next part.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
When you get to the final battle in the Unknown Origins Flashpoint campaign, you’ll find yourself in the middle of a heated rivalry between two of the most notorious Mechwarriors in Battletech lore…
FIGHT!
During this battle, if you take the time to look, you’ll notice that not only do these two have legendary abilities, they also have the mechs to match! Much like the new mechbay viewer, this wasn’t in the original scope of the expansion, but it was relatively low risk and there was enough excitement on the team to pull it off that we figured it was worth doing.
To start with, we picked a paint scheme and color combo that was at least close to what we wanted, but we still weren’t happy with how rough Black Widow’s Warhammer looked (it’s described as being in pristine condition, which is impossibly rare for a mech as old as this) and I wasn’t satisfied with the variations in green that I was able to get with our stock colors for the Bounty Hunter (his mech is described as being more over-the-top with it’s bright green C-Bill theme)
It’s fine as a base. We could have shipped with this and called it a day, but it wouldn’t have done them justice.
Since this came in so close to ship, there wasn’t time to coordinate another batch of textures for our contract artists, so with some guidance from our tech artist Lee, I went in and edited the albedo texture sheets myself, cleaning up any scratches and adjusting the colors. For the Bounty Hunter I also added some flashy metallic C-Bill logos for maximum bling.
Check out these wallpaper worthy shots that Lee grabbed.
Cleanest 'Mech in the Inner Sphere… but how did she get such a well maintained Warhammer?
C.R.E.A.M.
Their lances also got some small adjustments to match, but less so, since we really wanted these two to stand out.
FIGHT!
During this battle, if you take the time to look, you’ll notice that not only do these two have legendary abilities, they also have the mechs to match! Much like the new mechbay viewer, this wasn’t in the original scope of the expansion, but it was relatively low risk and there was enough excitement on the team to pull it off that we figured it was worth doing.
To start with, we picked a paint scheme and color combo that was at least close to what we wanted, but we still weren’t happy with how rough Black Widow’s Warhammer looked (it’s described as being in pristine condition, which is impossibly rare for a mech as old as this) and I wasn’t satisfied with the variations in green that I was able to get with our stock colors for the Bounty Hunter (his mech is described as being more over-the-top with it’s bright green C-Bill theme)
It’s fine as a base. We could have shipped with this and called it a day, but it wouldn’t have done them justice.
Since this came in so close to ship, there wasn’t time to coordinate another batch of textures for our contract artists, so with some guidance from our tech artist Lee, I went in and edited the albedo texture sheets myself, cleaning up any scratches and adjusting the colors. For the Bounty Hunter I also added some flashy metallic C-Bill logos for maximum bling.
Check out these wallpaper worthy shots that Lee grabbed.
Cleanest 'Mech in the Inner Sphere… but how did she get such a well maintained Warhammer?
C.R.E.A.M.
Their lances also got some small adjustments to match, but less so, since we really wanted these two to stand out.
Ok, it’s safe and spoiler free now...and that’s all I have for this round. Thanks again for reading and playing our game!
Just for the hell of it, here’s a bonus gif of the Heavy Metal key art to show the process.
Steps: thumbnail, sketch, 3D blockout, paintover, paintover, paintover, done. And one more paintover...
.
