Unforetold : Witchstone Character Style and Pipeline

A short description of my role as Lead Character Artist / Associate Art Director on Unforetold : Witchstone

Credit goes to the following:
Ulrick Wery (Environment Concepts)
Philippe Vincenti (Tech Artist who collaborated with me on shaders and tinting)
Ophelie Eygrier and Lison Gorrissen (Character artists)
Yan Mongrain (Art Director - cover art, and sprinkling of director dust)

First Style test:
Our first stylized character test, we went all out. We pushed what could be done with a modular approach to the furthest we knew how. There was only one problem: the camera angle and distance meant that the characters were VERY small.

We had to show a lot of story telling and unique character backgrounds, using very few pixels. The characters had to look and feel complete up close but legible from afar. Kind of a "head scratcher" (ey!) ...

In the second study, we went for the same natural feel and flow but we made some key adjustments. We remained unchanging in the care, crafting and detail of the outfits but I felt it was paramount to reduce the noise in the textures.

Our strategy was to keep characters soft, with surface areas that would be easy to read at a 3/4 angle, without being boring close up in the inventory view.

Camera angle and style test
Credit: Ulrick Wery for collaborating on this concept.

We designed outfits that colour blocked silhouettes that made it easy to identify body parts such as arms and legs for what we dubbed "Little tin soldiers"

most of all, we focused details on key areas so that when the camera viewed top down, the surface areas of helmets, pauldron armour and capes were minimal.

when it shifted to a front facing view in the inventory, it harboured story telling details such as rusty belt buckles, or intricate badges of honour - classic DnD artifacts that would make player's imaginations run wild.

We stayed organized. We used and reused as much as we could re texturing and tinting pieces in different configurations like legos.

Line ups of modular assets

We made it paramount to work smart rather than kill ourselves over it and we took advantage of the fact that we were working with a top down camera, so sometimes keeping it simple was exactly what was needed.