GRAVEN News

My name is Ben Hale, and I’m a texture artist on GRAVEN. I currently work full time at ILMxLab making Star Wars VR games, and have had the pleasure to work on GRAVEN during my spare time and weekends.

This is not a tutorial, but a bit of a peek into my workflow.



I make every texture in GRAVEN inside of Substance Designer, a powerful node-based tool specifically designed for generating tiling textures. Even though Substance is intended for current-gen PBR materials, it’s surprisingly useful for chunky pixel art or retro diffuse textures.
You might think “wouldn’t painting in photoshop be easier?” Sure, it’d be easier if I only needed to do something exactly once. Thus far I’ve made about 500 textures for GRAVEN in only a few months, and that time can add up remarkably fast even with batch scripts or a solid painting pipeline.

You only have to do something once in Substance, and with some parameterization you can turn that one something into a tool to create many more. I’ve made several tools for GRAVEN that enable me to work modularly, and create textures in minutes rather than hours or days. Though making these tools in the first place was a time commitment, in the long run I’ve saved several months of labor.

I start a lot of graphs with a simple pattern like this:


From here, I can derive a lot of information, such as edges, which I can generate individual islands from, which I can turn into random gradients….



And after layering enough random gradients at different angles and intensities, I can get some lovely large rocky shapes, blend some additional rocky height into it, chop off the tops with some levels…



We’re getting something resembling a brick wall.

Here’s a gif of the whole thing through:


And here’s what that graph looks like, mmmm mmm spaghetti!



It’s worth mentioning that I don’t work blind with just the grayscale height trying to imagine the output, I have a 3d preview while I work.

You’ll notice that I have some OUTPUTs in there, those will come in handy for the next phase: color!

For the sake of brevity, here’s what the color part of the graph looks like:



To explain, I’m taking the height I made earlier, and some of the masks and other outputs I made, and using that information to create gradients, drips, color variation, grunge, edge wear, and dirt. Here’s a gif of what that looks like:



At this point, things diverge from a current-gen PBR workflow: I bake in the lighting. Using the green channel of a normal map I generate from the height, I can mask out the tops and bottoms of the bricks using 2 histogram select nodes. I then use those as masks to blend in a top light color, and a bottom shadow color, with a bit of ambient occlusion on top.



And to scale it down to retro size? This is possibly the laziest part of the whole thing, but the results can’t be argued with. I just down-sample it to 512 or 256, give it a light sharpen filter, a pat on the back, and send it on it’s way.



Okay, so you might be thinking “Ben, this is the most dull and arduous way to make a brick wall texture I’ve ever seen, why don’t you just paint it in photoshop like a normal person?”

Ahh you see, here’s where the magic starts. Remember that first pattern we started with? What if we just swapped to a different one?

Instant results, new texture, minimal effort. Remember, I only had to do the work once.



I can do more. I’ve separated the height and color into separate graphs with inputs and outputs, look how clean that is now!



And I’ve parameterized several functions in these graphs to allow me to edit things like brick damage, grout height, brick color, drip length, lighting intensity ect. From 2 graphs, I can make infinite brick textures of all kinds.



As I’ve worked on Graven, I’ve created many tools like these two. I find myself using them interchangeably to do surprising things, such as making a bookshelf!



Substance Designer has transformed the way I work forever, it’s enabled me to be more productive and inventive than I ever have been in my career. I highly recommend the software to anyone looking to improve their texturing, or to start for the first time!



Thanks for reading!

Written by Ben Hale.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1371690/GRAVEN/

Thwipthwipthwip "Ouch ouch ouch"
[h2]"Delicately arranged crystals are loosed in threes, making short work of weak points in armor, and with some effort, against foes out of line of sight."[/h2]

Greetings mortal! We are back with a third major Content Update and there's a lot new stuff for all of you to enjoy, explore and exterminate!

This update brings in a brand new level called The Hollow - a forest choked with ancient trees and forgotten ruins. Delve into the heart of the long-corrupted woods and discover the new Trinket of Deflection, an Artifact that summons an arcane shield. Activate the Trinket of Deflection in emergencies to ward off enemy projectiles or go on the offensive and unleash bullets, bones, and blood. But beware the Lurker, a new aquatic abomination waiting in the depths.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1000410/WRATH_Aeon_of_Ruin/

Let's start the new year with some sweet tunes!

If we could describe the music of library in as few words as possible, then it would be “mysterious tension”.

Presenting: a new piece of the GRAVEN soundtrack - The Cruxfirth Archives Music!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Hello guys, this is Bebeto, art director for GRAVEN.

Let me take you through the process of creating the visual identity for GRAVEN. For this, I’ll stick mostly with the environments that were seen in the demo.

[h3]Overall Look[/h3]
From the start, the intention was making a spiritual successor to Hexen and Heretic, games that most of us loved and played endlessly (or until it was time to go to school in the morning!). Back in the day, I remember playing Hexen with a couple of friends taking turns, and how we would be amazed by the atmosphere, how sometimes it was fantastic, other times scary as hell. That was something to aim for; to convey the sense (and scale) of a fantastic, brutal, and cruel world within the stylistic boundaries of our retro aesthetics.

The first thing I've settled for was the greenish/brownish color scheme for Cruxfirth, our first location. I felt it enforced the idea of a plague/infection, while also making a statement that this is not going to be the kind of happy colorful fantasy, no sir! As in maps of Old: Hic Sunt Leones (Here be Dragons - figuratively!!).

The grim tone of a place once thriving and now completely decadent was suggested by my early concepts but was brought to life in full by the team, who took the original concept and made it breathe with life, as can be seen in the game’s intro.





[h3]Architecture and technology[/h3]
Since it's a fantasy setting, we could take some liberties with the environments and technology. In the world of GRAVEN, you might face armored warriors, fur-clad barbarians, wizards and weird creatures. Depending on where you are, gothic architecture coexists with medieval castles, swords and maces with fantastic ranged weapons (mostly designed by the bad-ass Arturo Padua). And MAGIC. This allowed us to achieve a lot of variety in terms of environments.





[h3]Characters[/h3]
Sad to say, but in the world of GRAVEN, regular folks are not the healthiest looking fellas. Life is tough and, you know, lots of bad magic goin’ on. So our hero had to be more of an average physically fit person, than a bodybuilding killing machine. Somewhere along the way he started to resemble Chris Holden, our Lead Level Designer.



Some suggestions by the amazing Chuck Jones, and our hero was ready to be kicked out into the desert.





[h3]Enemies [/h3]
Given the retro feel of the game, I felt it fitting to look for old school fantasy references and make ’em MORE BAD ASS. I'm talking 80’s Conan, the D&D tv show, Masters of the Universe, Frank Frazetta etc. That's how a character such as the Dihedral Cleric came to be.





As with the environments, I was able to mix different styles both realistic and fantastic. Real World weirdness also played a part, as in the Mire Reaver Sword.





(Yes, sawfish swords seem to have been a thing!)

Overall, my aim was to find balance between something fresh looking but also something you might recognize in the back of your head.



So that's it for the moment. I hope you have enjoyed this small glimpse at the thought process going on behind the art direction of GRAVEN. At the stage we’re at, we’re still coming up with a lot of cool stuff, so hopefully, in time we’ll meet again in the not so safe but fantastic world of GRAVEN.

Happy Holidays to all of you! And in case you haven’t done already, don’t forget to add GRAVEN to your Steam Wishlist!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1371690/GRAVEN/