Art Production
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Coming to the New World: Artistically Bringing Tiny Details to Life
New World is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed by Amazon Games and released in September 2021. Over a million players entered New World on launch day, and new adventurers continue to flock to its shores as the game adds new zones, enemies, weapons, and more exciting content.
The game takes place on a magical island called Aeternum. Players must survive the harsh environment and build a new civilization. In New World, players need to team up with others to protect fortified strongholds against hostile creatures and other players. Get ready for a bloody struggle for survival!
1518 Studios is proud to have provided art production for such an outstanding project.
One of the many interesting elements of this project was the ability to visually evaluate and tweak the assets in the Amazon Lumberyard game engine.
The project required individual model enhancement to achieve ideal results in the engine. This time we were fortunate to work with Amazon Lumberyard in depth. The engine produces a very high-quality picture, but precise adjustments must be made of the Specular and Glossiness values to realize the specific look desired.
This is how we managed to achieve the most vibrant results.
For us, the artists, working with the concept art of this studio was the most enjoyable thing; it was an example of very high-quality work. The character and weapon designs inspired us. 2D art was also prepared for the convenience of the 3D artists rendering them: perspectives from all angles, clear drawings without unnecessary shadows or color variations, and detailed and clear reference photos illustrating the properties of the materials on different parts of the assets. Such nuances help our work a lot.
One of the highlights was the abundance of different patterns and ornaments on character armor. There are quite a few ways you can produce these effects, and we chose the most convenient for us.
Conventionally, working with patterns can be divided into two options: creating them at the highly detailed model stage or at the texture stage.
Both options have their pros and cons. For example, creating patterns at the high-poly stage allows us to work with the model’s depth, achieving a more interesting and varied shape with the grooves or protruding elements of the pattern. Choosing this option ensures smoother work with SP generators, since the patterns immediately appear on the baked textures.
However, we lose control and variability when changing and adjusting these patterns at the high-poly stage. Adding patterns at the texture stage gives us the ability to quickly scale and adjust the design. This option comes with issues of their own: in most cases it requires additional preparation of UVs by aligning vertically and horizontally in the necessary places. However, this allows the use of tile masks for the pattern instead of creating the entire pattern manually.
Where possible, we combined both options: we made all the simple tile patterns at the texture stage, and everything requiring more detailed work with the shape and the pattern picture was done directly on the sculpt.
A particular challenge of this project was the various layered skirts and the abundance of tiny details. Fasteners, ropes, bandages—in general, all sorts of small design elements can greatly complicate the subsequent skinning and animation work, so we had to foresee these nuances at an early stage.
At the high-poly (HP) stage, it’s necessary to account for severe limitations on the poly count of the low-poly (LP) model and the maximum simplicity of the topology, immediately matching and adjusting the necessary elements of the asset for correct work with the bake maps.
The challenge here is to maintain an interesting silhouette, given the technical specifications. At some stages of the work, creating a quick test LP with a quick texture bake to evaluate the visual quality of the model was very helpful. A quick test like this takes 15 minutes and allows you to correct your work with HP at the early stages.
The most difficult thing for us was working with metrics. Metrics are a system of mesh constraints showing how and where different elements of armor fit together—legs, arms, body, head—and how the movable parts of the weapon interact with the hands. Metrics are necessary to prevent holes and intersections when combining various items of armor, both among assets made by us and any others encountered in the game. Together with our supervising artist from Amazon, we solved various problems that arose when working with this system. Often, this requirement did not allow the asset model to be adjusted as needed and it was necessary to change the design or proportions for the sake of metrics. These were not always obvious decisions, and many of the artists had to change their usual way of thinking, as we were used to following the concept as closely as possible. As a result, we made a great number of assets, and we were sure that they would clearly fit any outfit option, no matter how a gamer combined them.
In New World, we also greatly enjoyed creating hairstyles for the characters. We used various tools, including Xgen, Ornatrix, and FiberMesh.
The main goal when creating hairstyles is to achieve a top-notch result with the fewest resources. Complex hairstyles might require up to several thousands of polygonal plates and our priority is to optimize this quantity with no loss in quality. There’s only one option here: to create well-designed texture atlases. For example, to make long curly hair, our artists use not only spiral plates with straight hair locks but also flat planes with curls baked on them. This helps to decrease the poly-count of hair, and with a correct arrangement of plates, makes it fluffier and more varied in form. What is also important is using negative space for creating volume and depth of hair.
New World – Hairstyle Examples
(1518 Studios)
In total, we’ve worked on 188 assets in 2D and 3D over 12,096 hours so far, with more currently in production. Part of what makes our job so fulfilling is getting to work with the incredible Amazon Games team. Working together on the challenges that arise in producing high-quality, highly detailed game assets—and making sure what we produce fits both the vision and the technical requirements of the game—is a dream come true. Each challenge is a learning experience that improves our skills, and makes 1518 Studios a fascinating place to work every day.
1518 Studios, part of the PTW family of brands, produces realistic art (and so much more) found in the latest games enjoyed worldwide. Contact us to learn how we can bring your story to the world.
