The Goal
I’ve been working on prototyping a card game recently as sort of a side project. It’s certainly not ready for artwork and design yet, but I felt inspired the other day and decided to start concepting the aesthetics a bit. Nothing super complicated yet. I’m just picking the low hanging fruit and trying to get a feel for the mood and overall style I’m going for. Perhaps I can work my way up to doing characters and such in the future.
The Workflow
Details + Breakdown
To begin, I used geometry nodes to model a hard surface sculpt. This was a really quick and simple process thanks to my SDF toolkit. I kept everything fairly simple to leave room for details in the material.
I then retopologized it and added some edge seams to UV unwrap it. It’s not going to be used in a game engine, so I didn’t have to worry about triangles and n-gons, but I made sure to only use them when it was absolutely nessiacary.
The material got pretty complicated in the end. I used a texture painted edge map and ambient occlusion to mix the base yellow paint material with some rust, grime, and scratched metal. The text is shrinkwrapped onto the grenade via geometry nodes. The world shader got a bit complex as well. I used a camera mapped gradient to give it a blue vignette effect.
Finally, I scattered various particles with geometry nodes to give the world some depth. I made them really subtle, but they add a lot to the final render.
And the rest is post processing. Nothing particularly exciting, just the typical color, brightness, contrast, and saturation adjustments as well as a subtle film grain and lens distortion. I was feeling lazy so I did it all in blender this time. It’s not bad actually, as long as you aren’t dealing with super high resolutions or if you’re looking for precise adjustments and visualizations.
That’s all for now. I hope you like it. I’m always looking to improve, so feedback is always welcome and appreciated!
