Skylanders: Superchargers
Other Examples of Work
The following images showed some other work that I tackled on Superchargers. For the first image, my goal was to take an existing zone and turn it into an overgrown, untouched section. The zone assets had already been created so in order to get the look I needed to remodel, re-texture, and re-factor what had been given to me. A few examples of this include taking the original sculpt in ZBrush and "aging" them. Another was recreating the trees using Speedtree and running vines everywhere. Finally, I sculpted alpha threshold maps which allowed me to grow grass over the tile surfaces. It was cool and we enjoyed it but unfortunately it was cut due to the narrative.
 |
| Tile Sculpt |
 |
| Tile Render |
 |
| Tile Sculpt |
 |
| Tile Render |
 |
| Grass Sculpt |
 |
| Grass Render |
 |
| Thick Grass Sculpt |
 |
| Thick |
The alpha threshold is a technique we use to blend two materials together. Taking advantage of the alpha channels on the albedo gave us control over what can be visible and use of vertex alpha on the model gave control as to where I wanted the blend to occur. For instance, I wanted some of the grass to bleed in from the cracks so I painted the alpha to only just do that and then painted the vertex alpha near the grass to express overgrowth. Another important point was the feathering at the edges of the reveal. I could control the amount of feathering even if I wanted a hard edge. You can see this work in the overgrown image above in the ground tiles.
 |
| Top Albedo - contains Alpha Channel |
 |
| Bottom Albedo |
 |
| Alpha Channel in Top Albedo |
 |
| Blend Render |
These next two images were created to look like they were underwater or in a cave. They are more examples of modeling texturing/ materials and staging.
Working in a PBR renderer doesn't always allow us the opportunity to tackle traditional painting of textures. So in the spirit of tradition, I decided to grab my ZBrush files and do some classic texturing. Here are the results.
 |
| Dirt and Rocks |
 |
| Cobblestone Road |
When I saw the concept for our nature level, there was a fishing lure that was used as a gate(we get shrunk to the size of ants so it made sense), I went to the level artist that owned that map and asked him if I could build that prop. I modeled it in 3DS Max and exported it to ZBrush. There I sculpted the wood grain, cracking and other details. It was then brought into Topogun to crank out a low poly version. Finally, I painted the gloss, albedo and cleaned up the normal map.
