This is the second part of the Art of Pivot of Empire showcasing the 3D art made for the Immersion Pack. If you are interested in having a look at the 2D art aspects of the DLC, I’d highly recommend having a look at Dev Diary #135!
In this Dev Diary we’ll be covering a bunch of the Characters and related assets, Table and Table assets, Indian Building Set and Harvest Conditions Map Effects.
Characters and Character assets
We always try to take great care when it comes to representing any nation that we are covering when it comes to both the character DNAs but also the clothes they wear.
Jankoji Rao Scindia II
Maharaja Sir Duleep Singh
Pratap Singh
Sarojni Naidu
As with the majority of our previous DLCs, we made a new table and four table assets for the player to personalize their playing experience. This time around, we also decided to add a new cloth for the coins to lay on since we’d grown tired of looking at the old one.
One thing to note with all the tables and table assets we make. In order to have them look as nice and realistic as possible, we do not light them at all in the engine. Instead, we bake the lighting in Blender, which is the environment team’s 3D software of choice. By doing this, we can make sure that the quality of the assets are significantly higher than what would ever be possible to do if they were rendered in real time. This does, however, limit us from being able to change the lighting of them, for instance during night time.
This time around, we decided to go for a wooden table, as we did for the Dawn of Wonder DLC. However, this one is more ornate, drawing inspiration from Anglo-Indian furniture.
For the table assets we always try to find things relating to the culture or region we are representing whilst not making anything similar to previous assets.
Yali Statue - A Yali standing on the back of a Makara.
Nettur Petti - A meticulously handcrafted jewelry box, designed following the principles of ancient architectural traditions.
Lovers Knife - Loving a rose is a beautiful story, picking it is another.
Hair Brooch - A splendid brooch for your hair and to strut around in front of your friends. Wearing it may be challenging.
Indian Coin Cloth - A regal damask with a collection of coins. Of course, we’ve also added a DLC coin! #Elephant #Collector
The building sets are always great fun for us to produce! We always try to push the quality of what has been released previously. However, we are a very small team of Environment Artists and there are a lot of buildings in each building set. We therefore try to always evolve our workflow by automating tedious time consuming tasks by creating scripts and putting our effort where we believe it matters the most.
Something the team did this time around was use the same shader that we do for the on map military units on certain parts of the assets so that every country gets their own flare.
City centerpiece and civic buildings - Cute
Farm buildings - We also added billboards that appear when buildings are owned by a company. The company logo then appears on the billboard. These have been added to the vast majority of other buildings in other culture sets as well.
Forestry buildings - On these the roofs change color dependant on the country colors, so they won’t always appear as dark and depressing as the screenshot.
Mining Buildings - Spot the minerals!
Factory buildings - Most factories have a unique 3D asset associated with it. Currently the Arms Industry and the Artillery Foundries use the same asset. The Chemical Plant, Synthetics Plant and Explosive Factory also use the same asset.
Port buildings - Ports usually come in two different sizes to avoid the awkward look of a large platform with a single dock attached to it.
Bunch of hubs - Here you can see some of the color variations appearing on most of the buildings. Unfortunately, we unintentionally end up with quite a few buildings of certain types in some hubs. The stand outs being Barracks and Manor Houses. This is due to how the split states are set-up in Victoria, causing several different nations to spawn buildings inside of the same hub. This is especially prominent in India where there are such a vast amount of split states.
Free Updates!
These are some things we wanted to share that are free as part of 1.8.Portrait Lighting
We took the time to go over the portrait lighting. This is something we’ve wanted to do for quite some time but haven’t had the time for.
To represent the different Harvest Conditions as part of the Famine system introduced for 1.8, the team has been working on ways to represent them on the 3D map. Due to time constraints, we haven’t been able to visualize all of them for the initial release. We are however planning to do so through hotfixes. Below you can see some of the ones available on release.
Drought
We added a shader effect to the ground to give a dryer look.
Puddles are added to the ground in order to visualize flooding.
Frost
Snowy frost texture is added to the terrain and particles of snow roam the landscape.
Particle effects of large chunks of ice falling from the sky. Small bits of hail can be found scattered on the terrain as well.
Now more places than Great Britain can have beautiful weather.
For Pollination Surge, Moderate Rain and Optimal Sunlight we’ve added a more general shimmering effect to represent all three conditions.
And so we come to the end of the diary, next is the release of Pivot of Empire and Update 1.8 on the 21st of November, alongside the Changelog. As we have done in previous changelogs, we will also have new achievements shown in it!
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