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Nov. 13, 2019
Shining Nikki: Creating and Scanning Elegant Fabrics for China’s Most Popular Mobile Dress-Up Game
Let’s have a look at how Paper Games creates elegant fabric materials for Shining Nikki
Introduction
Hello everyone! I’m Liu Cong Vasiliy. I am the art director of Paper Games. Back in August, we launched the Simplified Chinese version of SHINING NIKKI. Paper Games has been developing 2D games only; this is the first time we use 3D technology to make a dress-up game.
Shining Nikki reached first place in the IOS free games ranking and fourth on the best-selling list in China. The quality of cloth materials and the character design is the top quality of China’s 3D dress-up games.
Importance of Materials
Materials are the most important part of Shining Nikki. Indeed, we have put a lot of effort into making this game beautiful through rich details.
We seek to provide the same visual effects for domestic plays as others across other parts of the world; we want to show that we can do that domestically with mobile games.
Development details:
When creating materials for Shining Nikki, I did a deep study of fabrics in order to achieve a high-level quality. The most important difference between fabrics is the weave. Through texture combination, players can make numerous changes and enjoy the small details.
I decided to use Substance Designer to produce textures in order to achieve better results and be more efficient and precise in my workflow.
To get an accurate Normal bump, I prefer the most direct way: simulating real knitting with 3D modeling. The following are sets of braiding models we made earlier.
Pros and cons of procedure for 3D modeling texture
The procedure for 3D modeling texture has pros and cons. The quality that the procedure produces is high, but it costs a lot. However, the costs of revising the texture are higher than anything else. I have made a great many textures. When revision happens to a library of textures, it would be hard to imagine how expensive it would be. Still, it is hard to standardize and regulate model textures.
To make the pipeline more satisfying, efficient and reasonable, I decided to use Substance Designer for texture creation. We’ve invested a lot of time and effort into Substance Designer. But it is worthwhile, as it has presented us with the super effects seen in the first demo reel video. We are not content with that, as we wish to achieve even better results.
There are four reasons for me to make textures with Substance Designer.
Quality
First of all, quality. Textures made in Substance Designer are very similar to the textures of the model, but the model is limited in the number of polygons and can’t handle the finer details. Substance Designer can completely achieve the material requirements, helping us achieve finer details.
Efficiency
Secondly, efficiency. From production to variation, the workflow of Substance Designer is very efficient.
Material managment and file sharing
Third, material management and file sharing. For example, if files are not revised by their original creators, it is difficult to manage these revisions in traditional modeling, which leads to more issues. But by using Substance Designer, as it is a node-based procedure, anyone with a good knowledge of the software may find it easy to make corrections down the road.
Most advanced development processes and software
The above three parts are vital for developing a project. But also because I personally prefer to use the industry’s most advanced development processes and software.
Breakdown
A simple knitting texture breakdown:
Cloth model and range
In the process, the following cloth model is used to test how texture direction and depth will look like amongst different materials.
Far, mid and close range.
Roughness and Metallic values
In addition, the values of Roughness and Metallic should be changed to reflect texture effects.
Random effects
Random effects are necessary to add variation.
Random wear
Random thrum
Base layer + Random wear + Random thrum.
Distinguishing different materials.
Here is how to distinguish cambric from yarn: If the intrinsic texture color is changed, we can get a more vivid material. What matters most is to know how to break down materials, to understand the different components. In this way, we can use Substance Designer to make more accurate materials.
On the one hand, we can employ Substance Designer to produce high-quality textures. On the other hand, numerous types of materials and textures are available in the Substance 3D Assets material library, which sometimes need to be tweaked.
Substance Pipeline
Let me talk about the new Substance pipeline that we integrated recently.
We are taking photos to get the original textures first, then we create a PBR material thanks to Substance. We are taking lace as an example since it’s quite difficult to handle. Thanks to Substance Designer and Substance Alchemist, we can quickly process the PBR material from a photo.
Process of the Lace
In today’s demonstration, I will finish the process of the lace in Substance Designer. the workflow in Substance Alchemist is basically similar.
We first take photos with a single-lens reflex camera to capture the reference with full details. We optimize the extra details of the photo by adjusting the contrast (you don’t have to do this if you build a lightbox).
As below:
Drag the photo into Substance Designer, first cut the reference with the Crop node, choose grayscale or color.
In this case, the lace is pure black, I just chose Crop Grayscale to proceed, by adjusting the position of the picture boundary to fix the tiling.
Then I can use the Bevel node to get my Normal, through Distance, Smoothing, Normal Intensity parameters to adjust the Normal’s bump information.
This is the first Normal we got from the Bevel node. But we can get a better-detailed Normal.
In order to enrich the bump effect of the lace, we used the Bevel node again, to achieve more details of bumps and undulations. After this, we blend it with the first Normal we got before.
To push further, we blend one more layer with a fabric texture, so that we could get richer detail variations as below:
This is the whole node process.
The final effect.
In addition, Substance Designer also provides a series of nodes to process scanned textures to PBR materials, which can be used for multi-angle light scanning or just single photos. We can select the correct nodes pipeline according to the different texture requirements. This method is very practical, and we also used it for the current project.
Through the Bitmap to Material light node, we can easily convert the photo into PBR materials:
It’s a painful thing to handle the photo seams, but we can process seams automatically with Make it Tile Photo Nodes, and the parameters can also help better optimize the seams according to the requirements, then the combined effect can be optimized by adjusting the distortion and width of the seam area for blurring the integrate effect.
Note: we are also trying multi-angle light scanning, this is the official tutorial if you are interested to study it. Now with Substance Alchemist, processing scan data becomes even more intuitive and simple.
Challenge of Chinese style embroidery
At present, our biggest challenge is the Chinese style embroidery, as the line of embroidery is so exquisite that we can’t just create it in a traditional way. We hope new updates will come by Substance Designer dev team.
Substance is a must for us who are working on next-generation productions.
I like the function node most in Substance Designer. As the first producers using Unreal 3 to develop games, nodes in Substance Designer enable me to feel that my imagination can go beyond any limits to create what seems impossible.
I believe that Substance is a sort of development tool that can be pushed further. It’s a pity that Substance is only used to produce maps for scenes, characters, and materials for now in China. It hasn’t affected the pipeline enough yet. We should try to push even further.
Procedure material is easy to manage and efficient. With higher efficiency, the method will be popular among us to create more complex and perfect resources, which has boosted the growth of the industry。
The evolution of procedural art has led to more efficient productions and better results, so artists are the biggest beneficiaries because they can have more time to focus on artistic exploration, and users will benefit from higher quality productions.
We would love to try the Substance Automation Toolkit in our next project.
