FRACKED: Texture and Colour
Here is a brief look at some of the texture creation methods used in Fracked. In most modern games, we use software such as Substance to create believable 3D textured surfaces, but in Fracked we took a more old-school approach with much greater emphasis on hand-painted texturing techniques. Despite being quite a time sink for an artist, it was worth the extra effort for the dramatic style and the processing power saved by using this approach.
By avoiding complex material passes and traditional clamping processes that you normally see from shader-driven graphic styles, we leaned into hand-illustrated textures and finishes. That gave us the flourishes and bespoke touches that are normally reserved for concept art or illustration. Our world production / 3D pipeline became an exercise in impressionism and composition. It was a real creative challenge for even some of the most competent of 3D artists. The motivation was never realism, it was flow and legibility in a vivid and dangerous world. Anything that got in the way of that flow or feeling was seriously scrutinised.
We produced many style guides during production.
This is a paintover breakdown sequence of the "Breaker Plant," showing the steps involved in achieving the Fracked look.
This guide shows a quick texture paint of a rusted metal. The idea was to help the 3D artists mimic the strokes and gestures of the brush, as the game required a lot of hand-painted texture. This helped promote stylistic continuity throughout production.
Another style guide sheet showing how to recreate believable surfaces in an impressionistic fashion using simplified colour and broad brush strokes.
This shows us bringing the techniques together in a single building asset. The tricky part is making sure the scaling of the brush strokes remains consistent across all of the various surfaces of the asset.
A sequence depicting an overpaint from the greybox supplied by the 3D artists through to the final key-art piece.