Towerborne: Fungi Forest
My first major task at Stoic was to nail down the art style for environments and produce a scalable pipeline for both 2D and 3D artists.
Fungi Forest was the first playable biome created for Towerborne. This was the process to establish our quality bar.
Assets and set dressing pictured are made by a huge array of people at Stoic and Airborn that I was privileged to work with for over 4 years.
Assets and set dressing pictured are made by a huge array of people at Stoic and Airborn: Myself, Eric Dagley, Pavel Elagin, Pedro Damasceno, Dominik Gröstlinger, Ilka Hesche, Jeremy Boulivet, Jonas Kunert, Valeria Traverso, and Kaat Van Thillo.
A main menu alternative that I set dressed for fun for launch.
The first boss arena made for Towerborne. I set dressed this based on the original concept by Pavel Elagin.
We started off with some initial concepts from Arnie Jorgensen alongside our own references and inspiration.
Asset paints were created by both Arnie and Eric Dagley. Eric combined the assets with painted lighting in Photoshop to help identify the visual target. At this stage, I had to iron out the pipeline for 2D, to get this to scale easily with a larger team.
Once enough 2D assets were implemented into Unreal, I could start testing set dressing. We only needed a few stages early on to prove out the procedural system for mission design. This phase focused on function over form - it wasn't pretty, but it worked!
To better utilize the features packaged in Unreal, and prepare for more 3D assets in the scene, we experimented with hand painted normal maps and displacement on 2D assets. Now these assets could easily react to lighting changes and feel more integrated.
Roots were one of the first 3D assets I made to test texture and model style to fit alongside the primarily 2D scene. Painterly base color with flatter normals and less specularity matched up best with the painterly 2D assets.
With initial asset implementation out of the way, it was time to set dress a small scene with the mood and lighting we'd always intended. This is the first pass.
A second pass was done to add volumetric lighting and fog to the scene to help enhance the depth.
Final lighting and polish with HDR tuning by Pavel Elagin landed us in a great visual spot that I am very proud of. Fungi Forest remains my favorite looking biome for Towerborne!