🔧 Dev Blog 6 - Let’s Paint Boomdakka Snazzwagon 🔧

[@LeX]

In order to capture the authenticity but also the casual chaotic nature of Warhammer 40,000: Speed Freeks, we felt capturing the stunning style of the 'Eavy Metal painted miniatures could be a great way to drive the aesthetic of the game.

To do this effectively across the vast quantity of assets for the game, we leveraged the power of Adobe Substance Painter and created a smart material that would do a lot of the 'eavy lifting whilst still allowing us to add hand painted touches to the models.

Research

We researched the look of the 'Eavy Metal miniatures. Looked at the painting techniques used by both the 'Eavy Metal painters and hobbyists so we could replicate this process and create a smart material which gives us an authentic painting style.

Base Model

We take the base model. Bake out mesh maps, Normals, AO, Curvature are our key drivers for the material.

Smart Material

Throw on our smart material. This material runs through a multitude of layers which mimic some of the base, shade/washes and highlighting techniques used to paint physical miniatures. We can paint in details in a normal layer which will be computed and given edge highlights/shading. So we can paint in scratches, dents and holes.

When exported as packed textures and imported into our custom Paint Shader in Unreal Engine the Red channel drives our colour ramp, whilst the Green and Blue channels drive dirt and rust respectively. The colour ramp is put through a colour table which has colour gradients set up which reflect the paint colours used on the models.

Where Red is closet to black, the model paint will appear darker, where red is brighter, the paint colours will appear lighter. This gives us the painted shades and edge highlights that are synonymous with 'Eavy Metal's painting style. The Dirt (green) and Rust (blue) are added on top of the paint colours.

Colour Map ID

In order to separate the different painted areas and provide customisation in the game, we utilize an 8 Colour ID map. Here we paint out the areas which will share colours in the game.

We use Red as the primary Asset colour, with Green being secondary and blue being tertiary colours. These will usually be depicted as Gunmetal and Brass/Copper in-game by default. We can also use Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, White and Black to cover any other details that may need to be separated out.

When you change paint colours in the game, it the ID map which dictates which colours go where.

Snazzy Graphics

An Ork vehicle wouldn't be complete without some snazzy paint job graphics. We apply these using a graphics texture.

The smart material has a graphics layer stack where We paint any checks, dags, glyphs either by hand or with stencils in substance. These are then applied over the top of the Paint colours in the shader to apply painted graphics on the vehicle.


We are able to change the ID maps and Graphic Maps to provide different patterns and customisation options in the game.

The smart material also provides us additional features for painting in Smoke (for exhausts and gun barrels), Emissive areas for flashy tek gubbinz, as well as other things. Once we are happy we use an export preset to export packed textures and we hook these up in-game. With a few parameter changes to select the paint colours we want, we frequently will reference the official miniatures for this bit, we end up with something like this:


As much as this has been about trying to authentically represent the 'Eavy Metal style of the official minis, a core aspect has also been allowing people to paint their vehicles.

It's been great to finally allow players the ability to customise their paint jobs in the Beta and seeing people being able to be creative with it and even replicate their painted mini's in-game has been really rewarding.

Celebrating the creative heart of the hobby as well as the talents of the 'Eavy Metal folks has been something we wanted capture. We hope you think we've done it justice.

Looking forward to seeing you on the battlefield, until then happy gaming!

Joe

Lead Artist - Caged Element


On behalf of Caged Element and PLAION, we’z shoutin’ a big WAAAGH! Thanks for joinin’ da Kult of Speed in Warhammer 40,000: Speed Freeks!



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