Welcome to ‘Foundry Fridays’
Hello! My name is Jason, the art director of Foundry. I have the honour of writing this instalment of our ‘Foundry Fridays’ dev diary, a place for different members of the Foundry team to share what they’ve been working on. Today I’m going to talk about smoke VFX.
But wait!! …before we dive into that, let’s first talk a little about our art style.
Finding Our Style
If you’ve been reading our previous dev diaries and seeing our recent posts on Discord, you can see we’re going with a stylized look for Foundry. Considering we have a procedurally generated voxel world, we felt a stylized look was best suited for our game.
But how stylized?!
If we looked at a spectrum with a “photoreal” look on the far left and a “very stylized” look on the far right, we’re targeting something that’s somewhere in between, but leaning more towards stylized.
Our art style can be described as ‘soft, vibrant and cleanly illustrated’. The weathered, chipped edges of metals on factory machines are ‘clean’ rather than ‘dirty’ with grunge and high frequency noise. Biomes provide a soft and welcoming backdrop that contrasts nicely with the heavy, bulky, industrial look of the factory machines. The ‘clean’ and ‘illustrated’ look is what unifies everything together to create a cohesive and consistent art style across the game.
The world of Foundry should be a place you want to stay and play in for hours and hours.
Now For Making Stylized Smoke
As with all the other visuals across the game, we wanted to create a look for our smoke VFX (along with all other VFX in the game) that fit nicely within our art style. Smoke is obviously a big part of the visuals in a factory building game, so we wanted to put in the effort to come up with something very appealing to look at.
Our first attempt was leaning a little too far into the ‘very stylized’ end of the spectrum. It was a more 2d animated look that you often see in cartoon anime. Although moving in the right direction, it looked too flat and felt a little disconnected from the other visuals in the game. Here’s what that looked like…
We then came up with a look that brought a little of that 2d animated look and combined it with soft, fluffy, thick volumetric shapes. So delish - I wanted to eat it like cotton candy. By using normal maps as well, we were able to get our directional sun and moon light to highlight the puffs of smoke. This gave it even more shape and made it feel part of the surrounding environment with our dynamic time of day lighting.
This brought joy to our hearts 😄
The smoke now felt part of our stylized world and also felt unique and signature to Foundry.
Final Thoughts
Finding an art style is often a daunting task. It takes A LOT of iteration and fast prototyping to finally achieve the direction that's right for the game.
Our stylized smoke is just one part of the overall aesthetics of the game and is serving as a guide for all VFX in Foundry.
Till Next Time!
I hope you enjoyed this Foundry Friday. As always, if you have any questions, please hit us up on Discord.
Thanks for reading!