Making of: pahelika artwork

[Freemind]

Introduction. We at ironcode gaminghave ben using Blender in our games for the past 6 years. Last year we released an adventure game titled pahelika: secret legends. It is básically a 2d game which contains simple point and click adventure dynamics, let me first get into how the game is de-veloped and how we approach the art-work in Blender. Firstly since this game is completely 2d, we require all of our art assets as images and sprites. Based on the story locations in this game we have a set of stages and their corresponding levels set in a Mystic environment, documentation describing the scenes was devel-oped first and a initial scratch of the concept by the game designer, which was then sent on todo the con-cept artista for further development. After his initial penciling is approved, the concept artista prepared a final concept rendering in color. To kep the time short and expenses under control the artista was instructed todo draw and render the bare minimum as todo give enough ideas about color, tone and design for the 3d artista todo work on, this finalized color Concept Art is now ready todo be made into a 3d rendered scene using Blender. A 3d artista now prepares the props and assets. The FinalRender of the scene and various interactive object renders were prepared todo be included in.

The game. In all of pahelika there were about 30+ scenes that were rendered with Blender.

Modeling.

Since the scenes each contain various entities, it was a long job of recreating them all in 3d and preparing them for texturing.

Texturing.

For most part the texturing is a mix of procedural or handmade 2d textures in Photoshop or Gimp. Some required a mix of both or Even node textures.

Lighting.

The trickiest part of the entire process was lighting. Realistic lighting could be achieved by using AO but it a los increased the render time tremendously, given the number of small but detailed models in the scene, none of the images that were rendered used AO and doing so helped us in drástically reducing the overall time of the Project, a normal AO render was anywhere from 15-20 minutes, while most renders we finally used were done in less than a minute on a Quad Core machine, since this is a one man team doing the 3d art it was de-cided todo use the Blender lighting for most parts, so it was a mix of scan line as well as Raytracing for all of the 30+ scenes.

Conclusión.

The only gripe we had about Blender was its Low quality of raytracer and of course the complete absence of glo-bal illumination and Caustics. Technologies like these are best suited for our type of work, so we a los spent time testing out Yafray. It is excellent raytracer but it sorely lacks the integrated fácility of bi meaning a longer learning curve in textures as well as the lighting setup. We were Fairly satisfied with Blender quality and a los my ability in using it. We have high hopes from Blender 2,5 for the renderer and Shader improvements that it can bring todo us, hopefully before we reléase our next game.

Thanks for reading.