Matt Helsom's Work

Matt Helsom
LinkedIn
Email: matt.helsom@gmail.com

Skylanders: Superchargers

Cloud Breather's Crag

This was the Dragon Level in Superchargers.  It was my responsibility to be the sole map-owner.  My job was to not only create textures, models, and materials but also organize (with the support of the map designer) and stage the entire map.  We were also tasked with making tracks for the racing portion of the game.

Below, I added a couple of texture breakdowns from these scenes.  We have a PBR (Physically Based Render - energy conserving; a surface can't reflect more light then it receives) lighting model for our engine.  Making the transition was quite the challenge for all of us.  I was traditionally used to painting light information into my Diffuse textures.  With this tech, we put most of our focus into our ZBrush sculpts and our Gloss textures since they now do the heavy lifting.  This left our Diffuse (now called Albedo) with just surface color information.  Plus, we had parallax occlusion mapping for gen8 (PS4 and XBoxONE) to add procedural depth to our materials.

Cobblestone Sculpt

Cobblestone Render

Stone Dragon Sculpt

Stone Sculpt

Albedo

Normal

Gloss

Render

Albedo

Normal

Gloss

Render

Skylanders Superchargers: Environmental Work

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.

Substance Designer/ Painter

Substance: Designer/ Painter

Group Exploration

After we shipped Superchargers, our Technical Art Director put a little idea in our heads.  What if we were to streamline our texture creation pipeline?  What if we sculpted our maps in ZBrush, but then we take the images and use procedural noise maps to create the rest of the materials.  At first, we were a little puzzled; how could we create our aesthetic, which consisted of a more painterly feel, in an environment that was about procedural generation.  What we quickly discovered was that it was quite easy to do so, if we took the right steps.  My art director had a series of images in which he used gouache and painted brush strokes on paper, scanned those and uses them for subtle brush strokes in his concepts.  I took some of those images, removed any color information and loaded them (with some tweaking) into the gloss map.  We did this with some of the other assets in the scenes below and were able to achieve the look we wanted without it looking like a computer automatically generated the noise in our materials.  The following is a collaboration of a couple artists including myself.  All of my materials were created using the Substance Designer/ Painter pipeline

Albedo

Normal

Gloss

Render

Albedo

Normal

Gloss

Render

 

Albedo

Normal

Gloss

Render

Albedo

Normal

Gloss

Render

As I said before, I was able to take the brush strokes and lay them into the gloss channel using Substance (can be seen in the gloss below).  The first thing I did was bring in the normal map, which was created in ZBrush and then used xNormal to bake it.  I have since learned how to bake directly using Substance; it seems to do a better job then xNormal.  Besides, removing an application from the pipeline speeds things up.  There were some details that I didn't sculpt into the normal so I layered them in using Blend mode and a Substance noise map.  I also used that same noise map to pull in more detail into the albedo so that it was consistent.  Speaking of albedo, I used the Gradient node and Gradient Editor to pull color information directly from the concept piece.  The picker allows me to drag across an image and it "collects" the color information which then I can tweak.

Substance Output

Substance Node System