Attention Rebels, Steam Awards 2020 are behind the corner and we invite you to give us a vote for an outstanding visual style. Many talented graphics artists had worked on this project to bring this high quality and we believe Gray Zone offers unique visuals.
Our graphical pipeline
We want to give you some insights on how we've created the graphics for Gray Zone.
Technology used
We used the latest software available in computer graphics such as Autodesk 3ds Max, Substance Painter, Blender, Adobe Photoshop & Pixologic ZBrush.
Models for most 3D objects were made in 3ds Max but some were made in Blender.
ZBrush allowed us to create high-poly models and sculpt them with greater details using specialized masks.
Textures were made in Substance Painter and Photoshop.
PBR textures
Every 3d object in Gray Zone contains a texture which represents it's color and behavior in various light conditions. The texture is composed of multiple components or layers and they allow objects to define their reflection, diffusion, metallicity and so on. For this, we use a standard approach called PBR - Physically based rendering.
Lighting
Number one most important factor when talking about computer graphics is definitely lighting. Quality of light and shadow plays a big role when trying to achieve realistic visuals.
Lights & shadows can be processed in either real-time or pre-baked.
In case of Gray Zone, calculating all lights and shadow casts in real-time is too exhaustive and unnecessary. This is why we've chosen the second approach - baked lighting.
Baked lighting essentially means that all information about lights and shadows is calculated and saved beforehand, in the Unity engine. It has a huge impact in a form of a performance boost since lights & shadows of most objects don't need to be re-calculated in-game.
There is one additional upside to the baked lighting - indirect lighting. Since we use PBR, some objects can reflect light in different angles and produce additional indirect lighting on other objects in proximity. This adds another level of realism into the scene. Specifically, Baked Global Illumination is the technical term. Such high physically-based quality is not achievable in the real-time process unless you use Ray Tracing.
Post-processing
The last key element to our pipeline we'd like to mention is custom post-processing tool which allows us to further tweak and calibrate aspects such as color palette, intensity of shadows, ambient occlusion etc.
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