09/26/2007    |    Devlog    |    BSharp    |    Discuss

As we’re rounding the bend here on Pirates of the Burning Sea, Artco has begun the “polish stage” of production, which means we’re creating less new art and spending more time revisiting and perfecting our existing artwork. While the polish phase is crucial, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we aren’t creating new art assets. For example, we are still working on things like increasing the number of avatar pieces for players to toggle through, as well as completing new avatar and ship spaces for you to explore.

One of the items we’ve been most anxious to create is more… well, piratical looking pirates! We’ve always had a lot of choices when it came to avatar faces, but the majority of these faces could be described as more dashing than dastardly, and based on feedback from our beta testers, we realized that we really needed expand our character creation choices in this area. So, with a bit of brainstorming and some ArtCo magic, our players will now be able to select from a wider range of broken-nosed, lazy-eyed, lovable rogues that you would expect to find in a world like Pirates of the Burning Sea!

The Anatomy of an Ugly Mug

The process of creating new faces is an interesting one, so much so that I wanted to give you a behind the scenes look at how we do it, In this case, production on the faces was executed by Chiu (“chew”) and yours truly. Chiu brilliantly concepted the character ideas, then built the models and “baked” some lighting information from them as a base texture. I then took the textures and painted the rest.

This is how the lightmap appears when Chiu is done with his part.

The next step in the process is for me to color tint the lightmap texture so that I am not working with gray:

With the gray replaced with a wash of brown color over the image, I then add a new “layer” of my own lighting information to the base. As you can see below, the face really begins to take on a personality of its own:

Finally, I add what’s called a “multiply layer”, on which I can paint the blush, facial hair, hairstyle and skin tone. This is the equivalent of a stage called “glazing” in classical painting, in which transparent washes are used to glaze color on top of opaque layers of dry paint. In Photoshop, the “multiply” layer property lets you simulate a transparent wash of color:

Here you can see the impact highlights make as they are added on another “normal” layer:

The last step is to add the teeth and eyes, which are leveraged from a previously created texture to save time:

And with the eyes and teeth in place, the final product looks like this:

This is just one example of the new gruff pirate heads we added during our last milestone and we plan to continue adding more heads- even after launch!

I hope you enjoyed the dev log, and if I know Aether, he’ll be coming around to get some more info from us soon!

09/26/2007    |    Devlog    |    BSharp    |    Discuss