Gunfire Reborn's Dragonchaser Reimagined as Painterly 3D Asset in Wayfinder's Style

Background

Hi there, I'm Max Osta, a Game Artist and Designer currently working in the game industry. I have spent the past couple of years specializing in hard surface art, working full-time at companies like Bungie, Meta, and now Respawn, making weapons and props for various game projects. I'm a lifelong movie and video game lover; I was exposed to a lot of genre movies early in life, so I had a pretty developed taste for stuff early on. My favorite movies are still the ones I grew up on: Terminator 2, Aliens, and later, The Iron Giant. All movies that I loved for the production design, the tech, the stories, and the weaponry.

Early Influences

On the game side, I'll reduce my influences (of which there are many) into 2 distinct core 'eras' for me. The first was certainly Resident Evil. I was 8 years old and already a huge gamer in 1996, already obsessed with DOS stuff like DOOM and SNES stuff like Mega Man X and Super Metroid, but the first Resident Evil was a big life-changing moment for me. I had a bedtime and couldn't stay up after dark, so I would wake up extra early to play alone in the dark of the morning, at like 4 or 5am, with the volume cranked up.

To this day, I play and love every mainline RE game; they are my favorites. RE definitely was one of the things that planted the seed of hard surface design in my brain; the games always have a rich focus on fairly realistic military weaponry, mixed with some fantastic examples, and as the player you can inspect them to orbit the game models and get a description of the weapons. When the original RE2 (PS1) came out, I was 10. I used to play with toy guns around the house, and I based my gun stance on how Leon holds handguns in the game – it was Weaver Stance, which is now a bit dated but was accurate to the period and another indicator of the attention to detail in the early Resident Evil games.

Career

So, I was an interface designer at an edtech company for about 10 years. I loved it; it was a combination of UI/UX, 2D VFX animation, puppet animation, scene direction, and so many other things. We made educational games for schools that were a combination of long-form character animation sequences and game-like interfaces to teach and test students. I learned a lot about design and accessibility, and really cemented my passion for games there. All the while, I would tinker at home on little gamedev projects and hard surface art.

My big AAA break was Bungie, which was crazy for me. As I said, I loved Halo, but I also loved Destiny post-college, so working on Destiny 2 was a dream. It was an awesome team, and I definitely learned a lot about hard surface from the guys there. You couldn't assemble a more talented team if you tried! We made a lot of memorable weapons, and I got to update one of my personal favorites from D1 – the Red Death. It was a wild project for me, as I got to look at the original files for a gun I used a lot as a player in the original game.

After Bungie, I landed at Meta/BIGBOX VR, where I got to work with cutting-edge VR tech and jumped around on many projects. Another great team, and the projects were an eclectic mix, so I gained a lot of experience with different styles and workflows.

Now, I just landed a gig with Respawn, so I'll be moving to LA to work on Apex Legends!

Drahonchaser

Let's move on to the Dragonchaser project. One of the games I keep coming back to lately is Gunfire Reborn. It's a deeply fun co-op roguelike shooter, with a really fun minimalist art style. One of the flagship guns in the game is a weapon called the Dragonchaser. It's featured in much of the key art, and it really makes an impression. I always loved how it looked, even though I don't regularly use it in-game!

Separately, I was really tuned into that game Wayfinder for its art style – I didn't end up playing it, but I deep-dived into all the ArtStation posts about the prop work - both official and fan renditions. It was a huge inspiration for this project. I don't know their intent for the art direction officially, but I liked the pieces that were highly stylized, still with good material reads, and had a combination of sculpt work and 'hand-drawn' materials. Particularly I had reference pieces by Aysu Hoscan, Maëlle De Gracia, Axelle Lyv Perrier, Kayleigh Danieli, and Guillaume Provost, to name a few. I collected a lot because it became clear early on that the Dragonchaser would have a lot of different materials, so I gathered references for all the different materials.

So I thought, what would the Dragonchaser look like in a more 'Wayfinder-esque' style? Once the idea popped into my head, it lingered so much that I decided that the next time I have free time, I need to try that!

Design

With Gunfire: Reborn's art style being so minimalist and abstract, a big portion of this project was the need to effectively redesign the weapon for the greater detail art style I chose. I collected all the images I could from the game, including key art renditions of the gun. Like many projects, there were certain details that contradict each other when cross-examining the different renditions – particularly in the case of material breakup – so very early on I decided this would be *my interpretation* of the weapon, and I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about how accurate certain details were (within a threshold).

A lot of the secondary shape details in the in-game model are extremely abstract, so I reinterpreted many. I made the jade parts into big swooping hook/blade shapes, and kept the upper middle area to a more abstract dragon shape. Certain renditions seem to imply it's a more sculpted literal dragon head, but I decided not to go that route. I felt that, with the art style I was targeting, this would be more aesthetic. The rope wrappings implied to me the gun was intended to be a sort of improvised weapon assembled from makeshift parts of different materials. So I decided the front barrel assembly was made of wood, and the majority of the rest of the gun was stone, along with the jade accents. 

Blockout & Sculpt

I've been on a huge Plasticity-to-Blender tear for the last few years, but for this project I did all my modeling exclusively in Blender. In Blender, I used images of the super low-poly in-game model to measure my blockout and get the proportions right. I used mostly vanilla Blender with a little bit of Boxcutter/HardOps. The blockout was extremely simple, and I aimed to get into ZBrush as soon as possible.

In ZBrush, I used a few primary techniques. A lot of masking and Move brush (sometimes inflating) for surface divots, and a lot of Orb brush work for edges. Also, for wood in particular, I used masking and the Move brush to separate big parts for the look of wood plank sections, then added in long cuts with Orb brushes. Here, pen pressure was useful to add variety to the thickness of the cuts. The wood was the most sculpt-rich part and was challenging, but I knew it would pay off later in the texture part if I had good maps to go off of from detailed sculpting.

The main materials for the sculpting were wood, stone, gold, and jade. Honestly, the sculpt treatment for stone, gold, and jade was similar: less surfacing than wood, similar edge work, and localized masking for little cutaway damage areas. Gold, I polished more for a softer look. Same with jade but less than gold. For the ropes, I didn't sculpt at all. I was confident I had a process that would work for a more procedural execution of the rope texture in Substance 3D Painter, so I pushed forward with that in mind.

Retopo & Bake

Back in Blender, I started the true low-poly. I used the blockout as a base, and basically pulled verts around to match the new silhouette of the post-sculpt high-poly. I mainly added verts near new edge planes that needed it, but the overall body of the weapon is very simple, so this was an easy turnover. I have a rather modifier-heavy workflow, and I usually stick to mainly N-gons, place the loops/verts I actually need, then use triangulation modifiers and weighted normals if needed. The ropes were completely executed by modifiers, using a simple Screw>Curve>Subdivision stack, then some Merge By Distance magic to collapse a lot of the unnecessary geo.

The jade pieces were done simply as well. I set up 3 verts in a bladed shape and simply extruded them with a SubDiv modifier on, as follows:

For UVs, I flattened/rectified all the super-curved stuff, then packed with UVPackmaster. I baked fully in Marmoset; lately, I've been doing no high-poly with just the Bevel shader, but here I did a traditional high-to-low bake.

Substance 3D Painter Workflow

This is usually my favorite part, and I was looking forward to it during this project. It's kinda where a lot of the technical work pays off, and you can get some immediate big wins if your bakes are good. I'm rather confident in this tool, and I hardly ever use premade smart materials. I usually start with some rudimentary material blocking, using either ID maps or masking with polygon fill manually. Most of my layers in Substance 3D Painter end up being fill layers with masks and stacks of effects; it's a powerful workflow and feels intuitive if you were raised on Photoshop. I like to use the Curvature Map with different fills for quick results to build on later.

For stylized materials like the ones on this project, Substance 3D Painter provides some nice filter and effect options to layer onto both your hand-painted and generated layers. Namely the Quantize filter and Blur Slope. Quantize crushes gradients into more stepped ranges, which can help stylization, and Blur Slope (min and max) is great for reducing noisy detail or creating stylized damage/wear. On this project, I used Quantize extensively, especially on layers involving gradient-heavy maps like your AO and Curvature typically.

I also used Quantize with my hand-painted layers; almost all of them had a stack of Paint>Blur>Quantize, with the brush at maximum hardness, so I could nondestructively control the falloff with Blur, then use Quantize to crush it into banded sections.

The ropes were entirely procedural, made with an extensive array of layers, anchors, and effects. I stacked linear gradients at various triplanar angles, then ran a bunch of effects over them for the base, which I then anchored. Using that anchor for masking made it very easy to add effective detail to this material. I added larger perpendicular gradients multiplied over it to simulate a nice lighting hit, for example.

Lighting & Rendering

I did all my renders in Blender Eevee for this project; I always do either Eevee or Marmoset. Marmoset wins for quick simplicity, I think; you can get absurdly good results quickly without much setup. But when I want or need to tinker with a lot of settings to get specific things going, I usually favor Eevee. I was looking for a particular look on this project; that "stylized but still with PBR-ish reads" was the target. I had Blender and Substance 3D open as I did basic test renders to dial in certain material values quickly. The metals, especially jade, were particularly tricky, as metal reflections can slant to realism quickly. I ended up with very little metal in the jade at all – .2 to .4 about – as it was reading way too realistic the more reflective it got. Gold was higher at .6 metalness. Balancing this many materials is tricky, especially stylized, so I had the Studio Tomoco HDRI from Substance 3D imported as a base so I could match viewports. I had a mix of edge/rim lights and bigger fills. I had an overhead sun light that I disabled the glossiness entirely on, and many lights had either diffuse or glossiness disabled. The jade especially was prone to catching overly glossy light hits, so this was how I managed that. With still images, you could edit a lot of that in post; I don’t typically like to do that, and with this project I had planned simple video renders anyway, so managing your lighting appropriately will go a long way.

Another good way to fill light on many different material types at once is to take a sun light and bump up the Angle perimeter considerably, like the settings I used here to fill this render:

As you can see, it already looks great in the native Blender viewport!

For the animation, I keyed a bunch of lights to move in particular patterns to get nice reflections around the jade parts.

Regarding the cameras specifically, I usually set up at least a 50mm, an 85mm, and a 200mm for ortho-looking renders. If I want a handheld look during camera animation, or just want to add a touch of realism, I throw a noise modifier onto the camera’s location/rotation graphs and dial the values way down.

This was a pretty brief flyover on the Dragonchaser project; I enjoyed making this one and love how it turned out! If you have any questions or just want to chat, you can reach me through ArtStation, LinkedIn, or Discord!

Max Osta, Hard Surface Artist