3D Artist & Animator for a death-themed skateboarding game - Board to Death - developed by small indie team
In this project, as a 3D Artist, I modeled/textured props, created shaders, designed tiling environmental materials, and rigged/animated our main player character.
“Board to Death” is a skateboarding roguelite where the player takes on the role of a protagonist who died performing a sketchy trick. He must skate through the afterlife and impress death for a chance to live again.
Project development is ongoing (2+ months). Team consists of 10 members using Unity game engine.
~3D Props~
I created a variety of hard-surface props with custom textures for a warehouse/factory-themed level. Maya was used for modeling, Substance 3D Painter was used for textures.
I made a simple pipe kit was made to support our level designers' creativity.
I made a simple pipe kit was made to support our level designers' creativity.
I also developed a conveyer belt kit with roller and rubber variants to further assist with level design freedom.
~Shaders~
I created a cel-shader and outline shader to provide a more fine-tuned aesthetic. As a team, we were aiming for a more toony, cel-shaded art style, so these helped us to help achieve the goal.
WITHOUT shaders (right)
vs
WITH shaders (left)
~Materials~
Using Substance 3D Designer, I developed a handful of custom tileable materials. The materials were used with a triplanar-tessellation shader in-engine. The materials could be place with correction proportions on any surface (through world-projection based texturing) and actual 3D depth is present (through height map with tessellation)
(Substance Designer graph for Rusty Fence tiling material)
~Animation~
After receiving the 3D model of our player character, I created a custom rig using Blender. The rig utilizes inverse kinematics on the legs to make positioning during animation and natural skating movement more feasible.
Additionally, the skateboard itself was attached as a part of the rig to fit our highly animated-based trick gameplay.
After some practice using video reference of real people performing skate tricks, I built our a handful of trick types based on the system our game planned to use.
Before bringing animations in-engine, I used Susbtance 3D Painter to create a texture based on concept art from the project's Creative Director.
Following is a demonstration of the game-ready state tree and parameters I set up to work in congruence with our movement script to achieve desired animations.
