Dev Chat: Baby Skins

Hi, Ida here! I usually work on 2D concept art & in-game illustrations for Prehistoric Kingdom, but I’ve been helping our animal artist Cindy out with the baby skins. It truly has been all hands on deck for us as we’ve been busy creating all the little guys for U14. I cannot wait to get this update out so you get to have them in your parks!

I thought I’d give you all a little peek into what goes into making a skin for one of the baby animals. Today I’m showcasing what goes into making a skin for our noodly Triassic sauropodomorph, Plateosaurus trossingensis!

The first thing in the creation process of the model that happens is Mau taking the adult mesh and turning it into a baby by moving the model’s proportions around. We use this technique to make sure that the baby can seamlessly grow into an adult. All of this is usually done before any work is done on the baby skin.

It is also usually the point where all of us just stare at the model and go “Aww!”

The first in-game view of the baby model with its new adorable proportions. It doesn’t have its baby skin yet. We’re about to change that!

Set-up

The texturing process starts by exporting the model from Blender. Since the models already have their adult skins, it means that they have already been sculpted and UV unwrapped. They also already have baked textures and scale maps. Sometimes the babies will get small edits in the sculpt, as well. Our animal artist uses ZBrush for the sculpts and xNormal for baking the textures.

What all of this essentially means for me is that she’s already done all the hard work and I just get to play around with the colours. (Thanks, Cindy!)

*Unwrapping is cutting the model into pieces and flattening them so that you can project textures on them.

**In this context, baking is the term for transferring the detail from a high level sculpt to a texture map that is put on the lower poly model. It gives the model an appearance of detail without being impossible to animate and put in a game.

The exciting Blender view of an A-posing animal model.

This is also the moment when no one else is looking and you get to play around with the model.

Usually we have 2D concepts for the animal skins. For the babies, however, the approach is a little different. We usually gather a couple images of extant baby animals, and try to figure out what kind of general direction would fit the animal. For example, with our Deinocheirus, it was clear we wanted to go for an ugly cute direction, so we gathered images of baby pigeons, pelicans and spoonbills. For Plateosaurus, I looked at some more muted, low contrast lizards. The adult skins have a lot of high contrast noise, so it’s a safer bet to go with something that isn’t as strong.

After the model is exported from Blender, I open it in a texturing program called Substance 3D Painter

The actual texturing process is about to start. This is what the model looks like after it’s exported from Blender into the texturing program. The right side of the screen shows the UV unwrapped model.

Painting

The baby skin has to match the adult skin(s) it can grow into, which sometimes means matching three different colours and patterns. We overlay all the adult skins on the model and see what areas stand out. Are there overlapping patterns? Areas of high contrast? What kind of a base tone fits all of the skins without creating jarring transitions?

I build up the colours on the models with layers. They range from the darkest to the lightest tones, all controlled with hand painted masks so that it’s easy to change the colours while still keeping the pattern work

Painting the model!

Checking the skin in-engine.

I usually set up the new skin in Unity to test it out pretty early on. It’s easier to work on the skin when you’re able to see what it looks like with the in-game lighting and the actual baby proportions.

After the skin diffuse is finished, we also make pattern masks. This allows us to control the animal colour variation and genetic mutations!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this look into the process. If you want to see more behind the scenes content, please consider becoming a member on our Patreon, where we post progress updates and other behind the scenes material weekly!

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