Supercell Helsinki: Creating Stylized Content for Clash of Clans and Clash Royale

High-Resolution Models

Like I mentioned earlier, we usually get the high-resolution model from one of our freelancers or from one of our character artists in-house. This one was from our amazing freelancer character modeler Anders Ehrenborg.

Here the model is ready for texturing with UDIMs. At this stage I usually take the metal parts and take them to ZBrush for a little detailing work. The rest of the geometry I duplicate and smooth them for a couple of iterations and then use those as high res for baking.

This is just as an example of little details I give to metal parts, keeping the details subtle and very local. It’s easy to go overboard with crazy sculpting and detailing, so I try to avoid it. I also export ZBrush high res geometry to Substance for baking.

Taking the model to Substance Painter, setting things up and baking is very straightforward. I export two .fbx files one with all the lower geometry and one with all the high ones (including geometry from ZBrush), and make sure I name all the parts correctly with _low and _high suffix. All the settings are pretty much the default settings; I only make the antialiasing higher and making sure that match by mesh name is selected. That way the baker is only looking parts with the correct name. This way I always end up with clean bakes!

For all the basic materials, we have base smart material that we can use for everything. We can take the base smart materials and, by tweaking color and values, we can come up with new materials. Our base metal materials consist of a couple of color layers that give variation to albedo and roughness channel. We use mask editor in various ways, for example, when creating a basic dirt layer, as well as with a curvature map to give more variation on the edges of the mesh. By adding one or two layers just for roughness can give you that nice extra detail.

All the materials we have in our library are the result of many people involved, and they have evolved over the years. I want to credit our partner in Germany, Airborn Studios, and many people in-house, especially Brice Laville Saint-Martin.

Leather material uses the same principle. All the leather materials in this character (dress, quiver, belt, shoes) use the same base material. With leather, the key thing is the grunge leather material. That’s going to drive the height map, which gives the actual leather pattern in the material. A couple of color layers give variation in the albedo.

Always when making the materials I think about how the material will change when it is used. For example, leather will naturally get more damaged in the corners — thinking about where the dirt and damage will accumulate and what kind of changes will the material get over time is key in making believable materials. Subtle changes in the color and value with gradients will drive the viewer’s eye to the desired direction, usually to the character’s face.

In the screenshot you can also see the albedo with little variation in the color; we’re keeping things fairly simple.

More information and details in the roughness channel.

Exporting the maps to Maya

When done with texturing, it’s time to export the maps to Maya. Substance Painter already got handy presets for exporting UDIMS to Arnold 5. In Maya you can choose in the texture option that you want to use UDIMS and it automatically detects all the textures. Then it’s just a matter of setting the right color space for all the textures, srgb for baseColor, and raw for metalness, roughness, and height.

For the hair we use our own shaders, but with the Substance generator, we can quickly export masks that will give us extra control to mask out certain things in the shader.