Before opening any 3D software, we look for references and place them together...

• To get a grip about the feeling we want to convey.
• To establish The overall shape reference.
• To define a good looking topology.

When it comes to picking the right colors, I like to visit Adobe Colors to quickly make my own set of color palettes or to create one from the colors of the images from the references.

These are some of the palettes for this project:

To open the project, we can use the default template for Painter since we are only going to use the albedo on this project, but if we want use some opacity to add some transparency on the model I prefer to use the left one.
It's not necessary to decide it right now since you can change it any moment from the shader settings.

It's possible to import the normal maps and other additional maps when you start a project, but you can get a pretty good result from the baker mesh maps in the Texture Set settings.

One of the things I like to do, is to add a Fill layer with a base color without detailing anything to see that the composition works.  At this time, on the project I usually work on the Base color channel since the other channels are not crucial on this moment.

Another thing that I like to do is work with fill layers and paint the masks, that way if you want to change the color to try another tone you can do it easily in the property fill. I consider this one of the good practices in substance so you can leave the paint layer for small details later on. ​

To add some texture to the base color, I duplicate the Fill layer and change the color to a darker tone to see the changes. Then I add a white mask and start to tweak it.

I like to add a generator with a mask editor, since it gives a really good base for a mask, and rise the ambient occlusion and curvature.

Then I add a sharpen filter to harden a little the edges of the color, and finally I add levels so I can invert the colors, here is the difference:

Here is the final the result (without the  other colors): 

Then I duplicate again the base color and chose a lighter color to add some light, I do this by adding a white mask and using the mask editor again. But this time I work with the textures too.

As you can see in the image I put the  first texture on Multiply and the Texture 2 on add/sub, For the textures on this case I used ones that come from substance since it has a great library but you can import your own resources from File.

When I paint I like to add some contrast to the base to balance the output of color, to do this add a fill layer in soft light or overlay and modified it with the light generator, to give it some direction and degradation of it, the light generator usually I leave it on Divide.

For this part I recommend to use a normal layer, so you can paint it over, since you can pick the colors from the base created before with the brush. For the brush itself I usually tweak the flow and the stroke opacity and leave it at half. 

Be sure to check that the two of them work with the pen pressure since by default is deactivated. Then on the properties tab I tend to use the spots brush and I change the alpha to dirty blurry dense. I found this to be one of the best option since is round but without a perfect shape.

As you can see on the layers on the image, the next step is to separate and change colors, dor the final layers, that are on top, the stroke opacity and flow tends to rise up, since the hard lights are on top of the surface. 
Morever, in this case I have to use the blur filter so I coul give the Ice cream the fluffly look to the Ice Cream.

For the rest of the items on this model I applied the same principles explained before. For the chocolate for example I created a Fill layer with a dark color and added a black mask, then I painted with white the with 0% hardness, until I got a ramp of browns as a result. Same with the strawberries.

For the wrapping paper, I used a stencil to write the letters on the paper using a Fill layer with  a black mask, then on the brush I load my alpha and the paint on the position I want.

When you want to work the other maps like opacity or the roughtness, Create another layer that has that one active and the rest inactive, that way you can control better the results without worrying about the rest of the maps.

All in all, Substance Painter is a really powerful tool, that can be used for a great variety of projects. Being able to hand paint the textures directly on the texture sets, different from Zbrush that paints vertex or from Photoshop that does not allow you to see the model in 3D.
​Good tool and Good luck.

This post is about a mobile premium game we are developing in-house, called Ma'kiwis.
Long story short, Ma'kiwis is a adventure game for mobile devices where you play as a shaman leading mini tribe people to safety.

This week sprint was about adding few items to the game and make the firsts cutscenes into the game, so we could start testing the game workflow with them inside the game. I was assigned to work on the cutscenes that gives the player an introduction to the game's plot and gameplay, basically the tutorial.

Story boards of the cut-scenes in Level 1

After trying for a few days I felt the system we were using previously was a bit limiting and it wasn't letting me do basic things like blend the cameras or time events like camera shakes or starting and stopping Particle Systems. We even had to animate the character interaction together as a single GameObject using Unity's Animation system.

The thing I disliked the most of this previous system was the inability to blend between pre-fixed cameras.

​This meant that we couldn't go back to the Main Gameplay Camera after a cutscene which resulted in cuts every single time; either that or fades to black. This felt too repetitive in my opinion since there are a lot of other camera cuts when simple events occur ingame, like activating a switch or picking up a collectible. I wanted something a bit more dynamic that attracted the player's attention, hence the blending between cameras was really needed. 
After talking with the rest of the team, we decided to upgrade the current Unity version we were using e (from 5.6.4f1 to 2018.2.0f2) so we could use the Timeline (Timeline was included in Unity 2017.1) + Cinemachine.

Example of the Popping problem when using Animator

Cinemachine is a free Asset developed by Unity that brings a lot more of freedom and a more cinematic look to the Unity camera system, allowing you to control the Field of View, Depth of Field, Camera Collision and the so needed blending between cameras, among other great features. 

This is done because we actually blend between the Main Camera to the position of the Cutscene Camera, which caused a stutter because of the Following script wanting to go back to the gameplay position. Basically there were two parts telling the camera what to do: the Following script was telling it to stay aiming for the player and the Gameplay one (which we were blending to) was telling it to follow the spline/bezier until the position was the Cut-scene cam position.
This way we always have the position of where the camera should be during gameplay to blend back after a Cutscene.

Another possible solution could be to have a Master Camera and using the Gameplay Camera as a Cutscene one, so the Master could blend between them without stutter, but that would've meant that the whole camera system would have to be changed and we couldn't afford that.

Hope my struggle with the cutscenes can help someone. :)

Hello there, for those who doesn't know me my name is A. Daniel García Aranda and I'm one of the co-founders of Polygonal Mind, and now it's sole owner.

This is meant to be the first blog post and  I'm going to talk you about the company journey from day -1 to the present day, what drove us to start a business and why we made the decisions we made on the go.

Last year my friend Jesus and I were working at Imascono, a Spanish augmented reality start-up, we both liked our job there, but we always loved video games and we both felt AR wasn't that fulfilling anymore.
On our daily work breaks and the time we spent playing video games together we spoke a lot about making our own project, until it finally happened, we started our own project on our free time.
Since the start we were really passionate about it, we couldn't wait to finish our morning jobs and come back home to work on our personal project, this obliviously had consequences, we started to show less and less interest on our AR jobs and everyone at the office saw it except us.
Some weeks later Jesus contract with Imascono ended.
And a couple of weeks later in March of 2015 I was fired.

Both of us have programming background and both of us don't really enjoy to code that much, but since Jesus had more experience than I did he took the coder role and I took the artistic side of the project.

Meanwhile we did our research about how to create a company outside Spain and I must say, if there is something we did right from the beginning, this is it. Maybe in the future I write about why we made this choice.
On August we procrastinated a lot and from this month forward Just Leaping was starting to become a car stuck in the sand, the problem was that we were in the middle of the desert and we didn't even noticed.

​Finally on October of  2015 Polygonal Mind was founded.
​

2016 started and we did an annual review about the business and the game and what once it was all positivism and confidence, it was all gone, I think we both knew at that point that the project was not going to make it to the stores anytime soon, but after some talking we promised ourselves that we were going to release the game and that we did learn A LOT through 2015 and the final price was worth it.

I was quite motivated myself since I was moving to London with my girlfriend for at least 3 months on March 17th, I wanted assist some events to do networking and making things actually happen, so I had the idea of looking for a publisher to help us finish our game and make some bucks. I spoke with Jesus about it, but he didn't liked the idea that much, he reminded me that we agreed on doing it all by ourselves from the beginning. Also bringing in a publisher would add more months of work to Just Leaping and that was something we didn't liked at all. This conversation was a break point for us, on one side I wanted to make profit with our almost a year of development, on the other side, Jesus didn't care about that stuff anymore, he was really tired about the project, he just wanted it to finish, codding was never his favourite skill and he was getting really sick of it. This made him re-think about everything we were actually doing and if that was his actual goal after 11 months of development.

A couple of weeks later Jesus told me he wanted out, out of the project and out of the company we both created. After talking about it I understood that coding was really stressing him and that his life goals changed over the course of the year, although we both wanted to finish the project we started, we could not do it together as a team, we both agreed that we needed to go separated ways.

He was burned out and I cannot blame him since I was feeling the same thing.

Now, I'm cleaning up minor projects to be able to start sharing more about my artwork and my path to become the best 3D company around, it's gonna be one hell of a ride :)
Jesus now is improving his 3D modelling skills, and he never typed a line of code since May.
As for Just leaping, the game development is stopped, we haven't work anymore on it, but as for the characters I have a couple of cool projects on my mind, but I still can't say anything about it.

Also I wanna thank you for reading my history, it took me forever to write this post, due it's sentimental value.
I know it's a long read and I had to cut some of the content to not make it a super large post, so if there is anything you would like to ask, feel free to do it and I will be glad to answer :)