Developing the aesthethic of SaTTi

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With the release to the public of Decentraland, I was given a scene block out and I was tasked with the rearranging the elements around and making textures based on a moodboard for Sometimes a Thousand Twangling instruments (SaTTi, from now on).

The Decentraland part of SaTTi consists in a series of banners where you can change what sounds are playing on them (which are generated from drawings) and that change the "music" depending on where you stop the banners and where you stand in the floor, making the sounds overlap in different ways and making the sounds come from different directions.

After seeing the moodboard and knowing what the project was about, and because I was in a tight deadline, I decided to take the same approach for textures: layer generators, alphas, and other elements that already existed in Painter to create the needed textures.

The Mission

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Creating a wide variety of textures and materials to make the scene more interesting in a fast and reliable way, to match a moodboard look.

Resources

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• Substance Painter 2018.2+

The Floors

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This was the brief and references I was given to produce something similar but with a more liquid look to it.

This is the stack of fills, filters and generators I used to create the desired look. I won't share the exact settings of the effects because the point is to get straight the reason of why I used them
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• Fill → Liquid
• Blur Directional with low intensity
• Blur Directional with lower intensity but lower scale, for the high frequency details
• Warp to bring back a bit of the liquid effect but with a "main" direction this time
• Warp but with a smaller intensity and scale
• Levels to invert the colours and adjust the clipping blacks and whites
• Levels to do the same as before, but this time for the Roguhness, so the black parts are rougher and give the material a more interesting look when ligh hits them.

The Hexagons

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These are some of the examples we were going for when making man-modified rocks. I really liked the contrast between the polished, machined aesthetics with the irregular and bumpiness of the natural ones.

The polished ones

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I decided to approach these ones as a stack of different layers instead of using multiple fills and filters in a single layer, since it gave me more flexibility to create variations, specially controlling the different opacities of channels in each layer. So these are the layers and blending options I used for this:
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• Fill → Grunge Galvanic Large in the Roughness channel, and with a Color Dodge blend option
• Duplicate the layer, put it under the previous one and add:
  • Blur Directional
• Fill → Fluid with a Blur filter in the Height layer, for those surface scratches

The organic ones

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Again, I approached these as a stack of layers These are the layers and blending options I used for this:
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• Fill → Grunge Galvanic Large on the Roughness channel for a bit of variation on the spec
• Fill → Crystal 1 on the Height channel with Warp, Blur, and repeat those last two to give the surface a more organic and porous look
• Fill → Crystal 1 with a bigger scale on the Height channel with Warp, Blur, and repeat those last two to give the surface a more organic and porous look
• Fill → Crystal 1 on the Height channel with a big Warp, enough to make it look like big soft shapes wobbling the surface, then Blur to smooth it out
• Fill → Crystal 1 with a small scale on the Height channel with a big Warp, enough to make it look like little spikes coming out, then Blur to smooth it out
• Fill → BnW Spots 1 with default settings (click on the seed button to get a unique pattern) on the Height channel to give that organic surface look
• Duplicate that last layer, invert the colours and with default settings and reduce the Balance to get a clipped mask, for the inside cavities
• Using BnW Spots 1 with a new random seed, modifying the Colour, Height and Roughness to a more matte, high-detailed one

Conclusion

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Not every texture made was used in the end, but it served to explore the aesthetic of the parcel, and we can always use them in case we want to update the scene or keep developing the visual aspect of it further.

Obsidian

Carbon

Floors

Rocks

The fact that we used Painter to make the textures means that we can export the textures in 4k and change the size after to meet the limitations of Decentraland (max resolution 512x512 per texture). Each of the textures here had 3 more variations made to them. Changing the opacity, blending options, seed of the generators and effects lets you generate variants very easily when you're in a rush.

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Álex

3D GENERALIST

Alejandro Bielsa is a junior 3D artist working at Polygonal Mind's in-house team. Passionate about videogames, vivid tutorial drinker and cat lover.

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