Blood Materials - Substance DesigneR
Infernal Cleaner is primarily a game about cleaning blood off the walls of hell. One of, if not the most, my important tasks was creating a compelling Blood Material for the game. This material needed to have high contrast from the rest of the environment to stand out, and also set the mood of the game. For these reasons I made the blood a slightly brighter shade of red then would be anatomically accurate.
THE DUNGEON - KITBASH ENVIRONMENT ART
The first environment I created for the game's vertical slice was the Dungeon. The idea was to create a medieval/gothic style intepretation of a dungeon in hell. It is covered with blood as if a demon has dun through it devouring bodies and throwing blood against the wall.
The process involved creating a set of high-poly rocks and bricks, retopo'ing them and kitbashing them into a naturalistic alcove. I then created a trim sheet of metals to use to create the level's pillars, spikes and other metallic fixings.
Next, to ratchet up the gore and brutality of the level, I created a bloodied hand model and scattered lots of them throughout the level. I pierced lots of them on the spikes to try and exaggerate the cruelty and evilness of the demon who had run through the level.
The hand models were a fun element to add to the kitbash set, as they enabled me to create some fun shadows with the lighting.
TECHNICAL CONSTRAINTS
The game's cleaning technology created many technical constraints on the way environmental assets are created in the game. For instance, blood distribution is stored in vertex colour data, which means assets require even topology for the blood to look good. This makes the poly count for assets higher than it would normally be. At the same time, keeping assets (like wall pieces) small and compartmentalized is necessary to prevent the Unity scene files becoming unwieldly. The below image demonstrates the geometry needed for good-looking blood.
To distribute the blood evenly with vertex colour, the cleanable environment meshes have to be quadded out evenly.
more to come soon...