Explaining Brigador's Art Pipeline

In this article a number of words are linked to Wikipedia’s glossary of computer graphics so that you can follow along without too much interruption.

👨‍🏫 A BRIEF LESSON IN COMPUTER GRAPHICS

Often we get feedback from players who wish the camera in Brigador could be moved to see different angles of the various models of the vehicles or buildings seen in the environment. We don't wish to disappoint those players but within the game engine this isn't possible because what you are seeing rendered in the game is not a 3D model that can be rotated along any axis. Instead, what you are seeing are sprites (more specifically, you are looking at 2D quadrilateral shapes, and what you are also looking at right now is a flat, two-dimensional screen upon which is a moving image that can create the illusion of depth through particular techniques).

Ironically, how we even make these sprites is initially by creating 3D models, typically through the process of kitbashing (this part of the process we won't go into, and we'll ignore animation rigging too, but feel free to check out this timelapse video for the Pantry Boy vehicle from several years ago that you may not have seen before) usually in 3DS Max. The part we're concerned with comes after a 3D model has been decimated, which is a process that reduces the size of the polygon mesh. Once this happens, we can give the mesh a texture map, which is the point where the model starts to more closely resemble the final product.

Before we do that we'll need UV maps first. A quick way to explain UV mapping is to imagine an animal that has been skinned: our 3D model is the animal and the skin that has been removed from it and can be laid flat is our UV map. Or if you refer to the cube below.

The program we'll use to do this to our 3D model is called Houdini.

To give our UV maps texture information what we then do is take them from Houdini along with the 3D model that was made in 3DS Max into another powerful program called Substance Painter that allows us to detail the materials of the model (for example, how rough a stone looks or how glossy a metallic surface is). We don't have footage of us working on Substance Painter but you can get a good idea of what it's capable of just by looking at this short official video that touches on a lot of what we've just written.

At this point we have crafted the shape of our model, peeled off its skin, given it materials to make it resemble the final object, and now we have to take it into a fourth program: Blender. Why we take the textured model into Blender is to do three things. The first is lighting, which we only do a little of. Blender allows us to influence the light-matter interaction, or how 3D models are illuminated – a process that is often referred to as baking. The second thing we do in addition to this is framing the 3D model from an angle of our choosing – in other words we recreate the same view frustrum that the player will see when playing Brigador. The third and final major thing in the Blender step is we also get depth buffer information, which tells