I recently found the game Disco Elysium and I really love the way it looks as it is very close to the style I had in mind for the game I am making as a school project.
I am not sure but I think I read or saw in a YouTube video that the game was developed in Unity so therefor I’m asking this here.
I am fairly new to Unity and game development in general, especially 3D modelling and level design, I have only dabbled with code but I do draw on my freetime so therefor I have decided to focus more on the art and graphic side of the game. I have looked through the developers of the game’s devblog and found some stuff about their workflow, but I don’t really get the workflow from a 3D looking scene to getting it to look like a hand painted scene. In terms of going from Blender to Photoshop to Unity. I think it might be most clear what I’m after in this post on their devblog, going from 3D with textures to a paintover to make it look more like a hand painted scene and then into Unity.
I can figure out how to make the 3D models for a scene and adding simple textures to them myself, but if someone with more experience with Unity and 3D modelling could show a simplified explanation of the workflow of painting over everything to get everything to blend together as well as in Disco Elysium I would be very, very, very greatful.
Don’t get hung-up on the phrase “paint over”. I don’t think it means anything specific. I’m assuming when they are talking about painting a 3D model after it goes into a scene that they are using something similar to polybrush to paint details on to the model: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.polybrush@1.0/manual/index.html
It’s a simplified version of Resident Evil 1 or older PC games where you store a depth texture and colour texture. These are buffers but I call them textures here for simplicity.
Initially two textures are rendered each frame before the dynamic stuff. So by rendering a premade depth texture and a premade colour texture, it’s effectively 3D to start with for that particular view.
I’m simplifying my terminology a lot but I think it’s clear:
render colour texture (paint or whatever for background)
render depth texture to depth buffer
Now this is technically 3D information so we can just render water or characters and everything else as normal. It’s honestly just one of the easiest things.
All you’re doing is just basically taking a snapshot of a particular view in a game but also storing depth for it, and using that as a basis for the rest.
The only reason you would want to do this is if you don’t want to use actual 3D models for the backgrounds - you might want to keep it looking like it is in 3D package, or prefer the quality of the 3D package’s render (much like Resident Evil, basically).