Parafolk Reference Illustrations (Patreon)

Hello,

I hope you had a nice week. The weekend is here along with a new Patreon post!

We won an award!

Woahhh! Thanks so much to everyone who voted last week! We won the most anticipated Canadian game award! That's crazy! We feel deeply honored to have everyone's support. This award is dedicated to you Patrons, without which we couldn't make this game. Cheers!

Parafolk Reference Illustrations  (For Patrons only. Please don't share)

Hi guys, it’s Léa!

As we told you in the previous posts, we spent some time improving the Parafolks. Now they have better proportions, a cleaner 3D model, a new system for the textures and improved skin textures. You’ve seen the most recent result in our Holiday outfit video.

Today I would like to talk more about the creative process behind the new skin textures of the Parafolks.

Our first art style was really simple and the body and face details were not very visible. We chose to push the sketch-like aspect that we liked and base our body textures on 2D illustrations with a visible painty effect: brush strokes and pencil lines. Thanks to those techniques, we are now able to have more details and visible volumes.

On many reference illustrations that we liked, there was a mix of dark and light pencil lines highlighting the shadows and lights on the characters. It quickly became a very important part of the art direction of the Parafolks; these details are visible on their skin, hair and clothes.

She painted the details directly on our 3D model in a software called Substance Painter: it’s easy to use and allows us to have the artsy effect that we like! Here, the skin texture is colored for showcasing purposes, but in game the skin is in grey and white and we apply color on it with the color wheel.

Since we are painting the skin based on 2D illustrations, we needed to have a lot of consistent references for skin textures in the art style that we chose. For this reason, we worked with an amazing artist: Lesly Oh.

She worked with us for a short contract in December in order to create the concept arts that we needed for references. It’s really helpful for us to have them for skin details and body shapes. Sonia and I can focus on recreating the designs in 3D, painting our 3D models in our software and reproducing the skin details from the illustrations. This way, we were able to save a lot of precious time.

Our instructions for Lesly were to create many illustrations to represent a wide array of characters with different body types, facial features, body hair and ethnicities.

These are some of the concept arts, we will show you more in the future!

Keep in mind:

You will still be able to change the bodies and the faces thanks to the sliders just like we’ve shown you in Maggie’s reveal video!

These are artworks helping us create the 3D characters, not the final 3D result.

If you want to check out Lesly’s work it’s here: https://linktr.ee/LeslyOH 

We hope that you liked this inside look at our creative process! Our next step is to create more body shapes for our base 3D model and integrate all these new skin textures. We can’t wait to show you more about it!

Take care! (ㆁωㆁ*)

Léa

PS: We would like to share with you the early designs for the Parafolks’ pre-teens, kids and toddlers. This is very confidential, please don’t share. We can’t confirm yet that they will look exactly like that. We are not ready to work on them yet, but it’s the vision that we have for them at the moment.