Hi everyone! Ariane here to dive into how we tackled the environmental art for our game Dunecrawl. By using 2D hand drawn artwork projected onto 3D meshes, we were able to create a unique aesthetic while also saving us some production headaches.
How is it made?
1:
Most of our assets start out as simple 3D sketches to build out the basic shapes (we use a program called Asset Forge). Freehand drawing from an isometric perspective is hard as hell, so we first start with these building blocks so that nothing looks wonky.
2:
We export a render of our 3D primitives in the specific camera isometric angle we use ingame. This becomes the base of our hand drawn artwork, which is created overtop. We do all the details, lineart, colour and shading in Clipstudio Paint. Sometimes, parts of the object will need to be separated into parts (like the awning of this building) so we can have overlapping details.
Next, we bring the flat 2D artwork into Unity for 3D projection. A very simple mesh is built to match the shape of the asset, but without any of the details (that’s what the artwork is for!).
Here you can see the separated awning and roof parts, which are meshed in the same way.
We use Unity Probuilder to create a simple mesh.
4:
Using custom Unity tools, we then project the 2D image onto the 3D mesh from the direction of our ingame camera (think of it like a movie projector).
More precisely: We bake a camera-projection into the mesh’s UVs: each vertex is converted into our game camera’s viewport space (WorldToViewportPoint), and those normalized coordinates become the UVs.
This creates an asset that LOOKS like a 2D image from our camera’s perspective, but has all the benefits of also being a 3D object!
Why not go full 3D?
Because then we wouldn’t be able to get that really cool hand drawn look to the environment!
3D is a great tool and can create some amazing things, but we really like the look of line and colour comic-book style artwork. This mix of 2D and 3D ends up being a good compromise between how far we can push the art without losing what makes the game look drawn. It can break down with some more complex shapes, but half the fun is figuring out those hurdles.
Working in 2D is also much, much faster for our small studio. Instead of having to build a detailed 3D mesh for every single object, it’s quicker to draw them by hand. Dunecrawl has thousands of environmental objects and we don’t want it to take decades, you know?
Why use 3D at all then?
Making fully 2D isometric games can be very tricky. The game engine needs to know what objects are in front or behind others, how to render them onscreen, and how characters interact with them. This was solved a bunch of different ways for classic 2D isometric games, and frankly, they’re all a real pain. Being able to use true 3D objects for building levels and moving characters around is much more straightforward in a modern engine like Unity.
Our game camera isn’t totally isometric. It has a very small field of view, so that we can have a bit of perspective parallaxing when the camera moves! This effect would be very difficult with a fully 2D engine.
We think this workflow of combining hand drawn 2D art projected onto 3D meshes works pretty well from both a technical and visual angle.
Ariane