Achieving A Stylized Without Touching Photoshop

JD Gardner talked about the way he created stylized space station with rough cartoony textures, lovely decals and some cool lighting.

JD Gardner talked about the way he created stylized space station with rough cartoony textures, lovely decals and some cool lighting.

Ground Control to Major Tom

Hi there! My name is JD Gardner, and I’m a 3D artist located in California.  I graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and have most recently worked at Pixar.  I’ve gotten more into game engines and less into offline rendering as these incredible engines become more and more sophisticated.  I created this piece to round out my portfolio, which was sorely lacking any hard-surface or sci-fi content. Let’s jump in!

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The Illusion of Levitation 

I was inspired by this terrific music video that astronaut Chris Hadfield created while living on the International Space Station: 

The ambiance and mood is so incredible.  The combination of the ISS and the astronaut’s old wooden guitar-something new and something old, yet both made by human craftsmen-is really striking.  I tried to imitate this effect through small details, like modeling the clasps on the airlock and wires to float and not obey gravity.

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In composing each “shot”, I also took care to include lots of floating props. I try to arrange them in forward-to-back space to create a nice sense of depth.  It’s important to have clear definition of foreground, midground and background, while taking care to avoid ugly tangents in your composition.

Stylized Material Production

In my previous San Francisco project, I didn’t actually do much hand-painting at all.  In this scene, I’ve begun to add a hint of a hand-crafted feel to the assets.  It’s not much, but sometimes a small touch can add a lot.

Albedo only

I made a few decals of imagined groups that could have been a part of this space station-I think it adds to the world-building, and including small details and easter eggs that make it more believable is always fun.  I kept these to the same main colors of the station, to make it feel like it was all cohesively designed together.  These are hidden around the scene, and just adds to the idea that this was something that was consciously created by a group of people for a specific purpose.

Modeling Challenges

While I was modeling in Maya, my roommate remarked- “That airlock looks adorable.  How did you make an airlock look cute?”  Trying to achieve a fun, round look, even on hard-surface assets, was an interesting challenge.

I think it’s really all about spending the extra geometry to throw huge bevels on anything that needs it.  Almost none of these assets have any kind of super sharp corners or 90-degree angles, because in my opinion, it’s worth the extra geometry to get the look you’re going for.  Some of this can be faked in the normal map, but for my money, I’d prefer to do it in the geometry when possible to get the soft bevel in the silhouette.  Just like with the hand-painting, very small and subtle details can add up to a lot, even if the viewer isn’t totally cognizant of the effect.

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If you’re going for this kind of style, it’s also important to “chunkify” your assets and make everything way thicker than it would be in reality.  It makes your assets really appealing, like they’d feel great in your hand and would have a nice heft.

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Lighting the Scene

Even with the materials being rougher than reality, I still wanted a little variation in there to pick up the nuances of the lighting.  For this scene, I chose to use all baked static lighting since I prefer the look, and the small size of the scene made it favorable for quick lightmap baking times.

Wrap-Up

This scene was a blast to make!  I love making fun, appealing 3D scenes like this that still feel grounded in reality using a PBR workflow.  I hope this was helpful, and huge thanks to 80.lv for letting me share this write-up.  Drop me a line if you have any questions, keep making art, and I’ll see you out there!

JD Gardner, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev 

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