Creating a 3D Appealing Pokédex with Hand-Painted Texture from a 2D Concept

Introduction

Hi everyone! My name is Alice Hu. I’m a 3D Environment Artist from Paris, France. I’m a student finishing my last year at New3dge, and I’m also working part-time at Nog Studio on multiple projects as an apprentice Environment Artist. A few months ago, I contributed to a group project, Trackless, which you can check out on The Rookies.

I started my art journey when I was a child, when drawing was my daily life. In general, I have always been passionate about art, but I was mostly amazed by the fictional and fantastic visuals that you can find in movies, books, and games. Buying artbooks of my favorite games sparked my interest in the production of those media, and seeing what you can do in real-time made me want to create colorful environments and explore beautiful worlds. That is why I chose to study Game Art at New3dge.

In this school, I initiated my 3D art adventure. It taught me essential skills, and the rest of my knowledge I learned by doing a lot of projects, hard personal work, and following my own curiosity. Getting feedback from my colleagues or friends and sharing advice with them helped me improve myself and my art, too. I have many other points of view to compare. All of that has led me here to this point. 

About the Handpainted Pokedex Project

At the end of a long project, in which I had gone far in terms of ambitions, I needed to go back to something smaller. So, I set myself a challenge to be more humble. Moreover, I wanted to learn Blender since it’s becoming standard software in many industries.

My objectives were simple:

• Make a stylized game asset.
• Practice hand-painted texturing.
• Have fun.

I chose the concept from Iwse Zhang. Since I didn’t find many interesting references, I just took inspiration from other artists who did the same kind of project as me or had a mood I found appealing. I stacked my references using PureRef and Miro.

Modeling

First, I placed my reference as an image background in Blender, and then I blocked the main shapes very quickly. I often overlook this stage, wanting to go fast, but it’s necessary to anticipate the problems in advance and think about solutions. For example, I didn’t figure out what proportions and space the lid would take, so when it was closed, it didn’t match the base correctly. Plus, the pivot point wasn’t placed in the right spot for this function. It took me some time to correct this by moving a lot of vertices. Being meticulous at the blockout stage is important if you want to gain time and be efficient. 

While modeling, I used a lot of Booleans, which is pretty useful when I don’t want to commit yet. I could go back to adjust proportions without having to delete or move other parts by just modifying the shape of my Boolean meshes or correcting my base.

Although it doesn’t always work well, since the Boolean creates a vertex, the new cut is made automatically, which is not clean sometimes; in this case, I had to make the connection by hand. Also, I put my Boolean meshes in another collection to find them easily and stay organized.

I pay attention to little details in modeling. Not everything is perfectly round/square or aligned in reality. I break the rigid 3D look by offsetting the buttons a little, having some happy accidents. Things like this bring more life into the asset. I deleted and remodeled some parts until I had the right shape and proportions to have a pleasing prop.

High Poly

The high poly was made from the mid poly; I only used bevel and subdivision to achieve it. I didn’t need to sculpt the cracks; I painted them. But I made sure in the silhouette, it would have the beginning of the rift, and then I would just have to paint the cracklines, faking depth, in the textures.

I found out that if your normal is inverted, the bevel would not work.

After finishing the most tedious part of this project, I made the low poly. I didn’t hesitate to add a lot of polys where needed in order to have a good silhouette. After the optimization was done, I unwrapped everything in RizomUV. I used quite a high amount of padding, so it looks better in Unreal for 4K textures. 

Baking

Before exporting my mesh from Blender to bake in Marmoset, I had to recalculate normals that were flipped. I quickly fixed the remaining issues.

Texturing

I worked with Substance 3D Painter to do the whole painting. I started with a base smart material I use for every project, using a basic generator mask that I took care to break the pattern after with my painting. I didn’t follow any specific DA and just went with my own style. I had one rule: to paint with only the hard round brush. I still varied the brush opacity to have soft transitions. There aren’t really deep secrets; I just paint like I do in 2D. But I kept in mind how my lighting would affect the object later. 

When painting, I often switch to the base color channel because I only want to focus on the colors. 

My workflow consists of working nondestructively, so I always add many layers of paint instead of doing only one, but my Painter file becomes heavier this way. The roughness is not neglected. Realistic or stylized, it’s always necessary to add variations and contrast in the roughness map to make a prop appealing.

I wanted to draw my own Pikachu sticker, so I went into Photoshop to do it. For practicality, I used a decal instead of putting it into the map.

When I take a break, I de-zoom to check if it works from the general point of view as well. I desaturated the details that didn’t need much attention to keep things balanced. I compare my previous and new texturing to push the rendering further and see what’s still missing in the painting. The rest is just polishing until the hand-painted looks clean.

Outline

To make the blue outline, I searched and tried some tutorials, such as using a post-process or making an outline shader ( Simple Post Process Outline in Unreal), but the results obtained weren’t satisfying and clean to me, so for this personal project, I went with another solution. I duplicated my mesh, flipped the normals, and pushed the bounds of the mesh with a Displace Modifier in Blender while keeping their initial position. The amount of displacement corresponds with the thickness of my outline. Then, I imported it into Unreal and just put a basic color shader unlit on it. Take note that it’s not game-ready and an optimized way to do this because it doubles your polycount, obviously.

Lighting and Rendering

To render my asset, I set up a neutral studio with a simple background.

I practically only used Rect Lights. I kept my key light blank so as not to oversaturate or alternate my asset’s colors, and I made the rim a cold blue to contrast with the mostly warm red asset. I used lighting channels to control what my lights would light and highlighted the parts I wanted.

I didn’t tweak my post-process volume much except for sharpening. It’s a nice feature to use on stylized projects.

Post-Production 

• I rendered all my images in the movie render queue instead of doing a high-res screenshot in the Unreal Editor.
• I rendered two frames of the same shot, one with a black background to use as a mask, and changed it in Photoshop afterward.
• An additional tip I learned from a friend is that to do a wireframe render, you can multiply your wireframe map (you can get it by exporting the map in Marmoset and also from Blender) with a basic color map in Unreal.

• The presentation style was inspired by aesthetics I’ve found on Pinterest, staying with the Pokemon theme.

Thinking 

To create appealing props, you need to define their reality. Like I said previously, you need to bring life into the prop. Analyze how it was used and in which places has it been. It’s all about storytelling and how you say it.

My main challenges were to keep everything balanced in my painting so as to not put too many details and end up with an asset looking too noisy. Knowing when to detach myself from the concept to push my rendering further. And self-doubt is what I had to fight most of the time. 

This project taught me that when I thought I had finished, there was always something more to add to make it better. Once, someone told me that a personal project needed to be done at some point, so I could collect the experience at the end. Sometimes you just have to cut down on some ideas. For example, I wanted to integrate my Pokedex into an environment. If I did, it would have taken another month at least, but at the same time, I had my studies to focus on. I had reached my goals, so I ended the project.

My advice for beginners is to be regular. Practice and learn a little bit each day. Paint in 2D helps, too, because the principles are the same. Start small at first with an easy prop to replicate, do this the best way you can and make it perfect in every aspect before moving on with the next one. Even if it’s hard to work all day, you just have to keep pushing and have a positive mindset to see clearly what exactly you are doing. To sum up, you just keep practicing to level up and find joy in what you do!

Thank you for reading! 

Alice Hu, Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine