Our assets were textured in Substance Painter using a combination of preset materials, stencils, and hand painting techniques. The outlines present on every edge are a blend of hand painting and an outline shader. Due to technical limitations, we found that the shader wasn’t defining the internal angles as much as we would like, which meant that these outlines had to be manually painted onto the edges of every art asset. Thankfully, the outline shader and the painted outlines ended up supplementing each other quite well stylistically.

    These bold hand painted outlines were made using a black fill layer with maximum roughness and metallic levels. The opacity channel was also used when necessary. Earlier assets were almost entirely outlined by hand, using the margins of the UV shells as a guide when possible. However, as the development of the game’s assets progressed, the modeling and texturing process became even more coordinated. Brendan, our lead modeler, was quick to take note of my texturing workflow, and, by maintaining a consistent channel of communication between us, he was able to optimize his UVing process in a way which complimented my workflow. The most significant instance of this was when I gave him some positive feedback regarding some beveled edges in one of his models. The increased inclusion of beveled edges in future models expedited my outlining process even further.

    After this, my texturing process became: use the fill tool to completely fill a section of the model with the black mask of the outline layer, then use the fill tool again to “erase” the middle segment of that UV shell while leaving out the beveled edges. This easy process left me with neatly lined edges. For an example of what this process looked like, the “making-of” trailer of Outpost Horizon shown above includes some footage which showcases this optimized state of my texturing workflow.