Hey folks! Long time no see. Sorry for taking forever, work and life needed extra attention. They still do, but I choose to procrastinate and focus on this anyways, because I love thinking about silly little props.
If you're new here, this is the third and final post I'll do for this game! If you want to read more, I've written about the rocks and the foliage in this game. :>
Without further ado, let's dive right in.
The Wood In Sea Of Thieves Oh My God
Strap in, because I'm going to talk about wood for a bit. I'm a huge rock connosieur, so by now I've got a pretty good grasp on modeling rocks. Wood and its ancient secrets still elude me though, which is why I'm so fascinated by how the devs created wood here.
The way they construct wood varies with each prop and its utility, and I wanted to bring attention to several ways they do this.
First of all: I really like how certain portions of the environment aren't just an even layer of wood planks stacked neatly against one another, but rather they choose to build MULTIPLE layers of wood planks, in uneven and wild configurations. On a narrative level this gives you the impression that these people are scrappy and have made do with what they have available, which is a shitton of broken, old wood from unusable ships.
I especially like the boat house; on one hand, you can see several different layers of wood that add volume to the whole piece. On the other hand, the devs were super smart in the way they choose to depict broken pieces of wood; as I've said in my previous posts, they use bold, blocky shapes to follow stylization rules (silhouette and readability are key!), AND by using big basic shapes, it's way easier to model/retopo the planks of wood.
All in all, just plain wood isn't enough to be super visually interesting, so it's also cool how they've integrated small details to break up the uniformity in texture. In the docks you have tiny round notches and nails (concave AND convex detail through normal textures...nice), and in the boat house you've got a lovely splattering of barnacles.
Secondly, I'm very very impressed at the floor texture in the boat. Planks are one of the most basic materials an environment artist can make, and yet there are a million ways to go about this. How do you represent the wood grain? How many modeled lines and crevasses? What about the edges of the planks? How many colors can you get away with it?
I personally struggle a lot with wood because it's a whole lot to balance! I often relied heavily on the sculpting of wood, so I'd make a lot of vertical crevasses to represent the woodgrain, and then that'd be a headache to clean up. Moreover, if it's just one plank of wood that'd be fine, but in a HUGE boat? You'd have to make a lot of variations, and in the end it'd be too damn noisy.
That's why the wood here is so nice-- you've got a couple notches in the wood, enough to imply the woodgrain and the scratches, enough to catch a little more light and shadow variety, but the rest is done through flat color alone. They're also careful of the edges of the wood-- you have a few pieces that jut out and have chonky bevels, or tiny undulations in the edges, but they don't go haywire. Otherwise it'd look like dough and the 'spell' would be broken. It's insane!
They also do further variations in color and texture, by chipping off paint with edge wear and erosion. With things you'll easily see close by, they put a little extra details in the normals so you can SEE the different layers of wood and paint, but even in low priority objects like that little table (that looks entirely low poly, but I might be wrong), they take the time to show that edge wear and age by using lighter colors in the edges.
Lastly, a little thing about sculpting: when you're doing stylized work, a big part of sculpting is flattening surfaces and edges. Extremely hard surfaces and perfectly round cylinders aren't precisely forbidden, but they're best left for a few select portions, as perfectly flat silhouettes look way too clean and, well, perfect, whereas the core of stylization is that everything is a little broken, crooked, and grimy.
Flattening edges and surfaces is fine when you've got a flat/square object, so planks of wood, and in general edges that are 90 degrees. Cylinders are a bit of a handful though! They're too round and soft, and flattening takes away their roundness. So it's hard to balance the need for flatness and interesting silhouettes, but also keeping the object readable as being almost-round but not too perfectly round, because then it's just a square, and sadly not all things in life are squares.
Thankfully, you can get away with flattened cylinders with wood! You can just say it's been carved roughly, like in this rudder:
You can see what I mean about flattening in this rudder! The square blocks in the middle aren't perfectly square: their edges have been 'sanded off' slightly to add imperfection and wear. The handles have also been slightly flattened, enough to have ea little texture and carved feel, but not enough to be completely blocky. Which makes sense--gripping square objects is a bit hard on your hands.
Compare how the cylinders are constructed with wood in this bridge, with how this cannon is made:
The cylinders here are a bit more exaggerated--rather than straight carvings, the planes curve around and wiggle, to give the impression of natural wood that's been tied together, but the flattening is there! Whereas the cannon is super super smooth--all texture work to show the wear and age of the prop is done through texture alone!
That's it for the wood--apologies for the technicalities, flattening cylinders is something I think about a lot when modeling and I needed to get it off my chest.
The Metal Also Drives Me Nuts (in a good way)
Protip: if you want to zoom in and see the details in the game, use your spying glass!
A lot of stylized games mostly rely on its sculpts and handpainted textures, even for reflective or metal materials. It's an impressive feat and it should still exist and I love it, but if I try to handpaint metal reflections in every object I'd personally die. I think it's also cool to take advantage of PBR and let the roughness and metalness map help us out a bit. That's what SoT does!
The metalness map gives a little bit of differentiation from stone and wood and cloth. It brings out edges and micro normal detail more, and deepens colors slightly to make them super rich, even if it's not always gold. These three screenshots have iron and brass in it, and despite being fairly normal metals they're cool looking and shiny!
They follow the usual rule of flattening and beveling edges, but metal also unlocks a secret third option: hammered metal! It's a great way to add a bit of wobble and fine detail to your metal, so it can pick up even more light. There are a bunch of great brushes that do most of the work for you too (blessed be Orb), so honestly it's all around a great fun time.
That doesn't mean they only rely on normals though: they still apply gorgeous color variation on most of the metals. You can see it in the iron chest--it has green and blue hues, but also deep rusty browns to break up the coolness. Even the gold is slightly stained and greenish in certain areas:
I'm super obsessed with the way they did the gold coin pile here. As you can see, I was drowning because I kept staring at it.
They do take care in making the bigger golden pieces slightly cleaner so they look more enticing though.To wrap the metal section I want y'all to look at the boat lights model.
I think it's one of the most detailed pieces in the boat, aside from the rudder and the anchor. A LOT of it is modeled too--it's fairly lavish and I just love it. Full marks, no notes.
A tiny aside for the ropes in this game...
I think aside from wood and metal, rope is also an essential material in fantasy-ish games. Rope, after all, ties a bunch of stuff together, and adds to the scrappy vibe too. It also is another cheap way of introducing texture variety fairly easy: most ropes are low-poly cylinders using a single rope texture! No need to make fancy arrays of painstakingly modeled fibers. Players won't pay too much attention to them, you can get away with it.
There are a million ways the devs use rope here-- you've seen it in this post, and I'm sure there were some other ropes in my previous post. They use the standard coil of rope thrown around somewhere (pay attention to the way they constructed the knot here! It's super cool and can be infinitely reused, rather than just closing off the edge of the cylinder), as well as wood wrapped in tight, straight rope, but they try to have fun and add a bit of wiggly loose rope here and there. It's cool! It's not the same repetitive pattern of rope.
As if that wasn't enough, they put a little extra in some of the ropes your boat uses:
The rope in the boat has EXTRA volume and polygons! It's not a straight cylinder (compare it to the rope that's further away from the camera!), it's got protrusions and valleys to give it a bit more depth and bring it closer to the real thing. You're going to be interacting with these ropes a LOT in the game, so it brings me so much joy to see it. It's super subtle and not huge in the scale of things, but man. It's great.
Lightning round: here are a bunch of props that I love
First up: the bottles! As far as shiny materials go, glass is tricky as hell to get right. Glass is translucent and translucency is hard to nail down in games. Transparency often looks weird, and making completely opaque bottles just make them look like plastic. Moreover, they're round objects and flattening doesn't like round objects. Again, if you overdo it, it looks like doughy shiny plastic.
I like the solution they came up in SoT! A bunch of the bottles are filled with liquid, by the looks of it, it's a shader, which means it's more dynamic and can react better to light and camera angles, as opposed to modeled/painted liquid (which is often the shape of the bottle, smaller and cut off at the top). Shaders also mean they can better fiddle with translucency and sub surface scattering, so it looks way more like glass with light passing through. Flattening doesn't work, so they do fairly poligonal round bottles and hard edges, which make sense for ornate glass bottles! Beveled edges can be an option, but it'd look less polished overall.
Not all bottles are transparent, because that'd be hella expensive, so they get away with fancy lighting effects and shaders to dress up those bottles, like in the second and third screenshot. And overall, they always add a little extra detail, either by notches, cool rope patterns, or ornate drawings. Great bottles all around!
The candles in the game are great too! I've spotted three different models that they reuse throughout all the areas in the game, but they also take the time to do unique pieces, like the skull with the candle on top (a classic in any setting that has a creepy vibe or area). I have a soft spot for candles because I had to model a bunch of em for games, and also because I've always been a bit fascinated with the texture and colors of wax....it's mysterious and also slightly appetizing. (please don't eat wax)
They're also cylinders, my nemeses! Flattening is done here, but it doesn't look weird because they go overboard with the globs of dripping wax, which add a lot of volume and movement to the candles. You might be disappointed to see that they're repeating the same three or four models all the time but: modeling a lot of unique candles is wasted geometry and time (as much as I love candles); each table and surface with hard edges has a different width and bevel size, and modeling unique drippings of wax for each variation would take forever.
Moreover the candle drippings are super dynamic and have a distinct silhouette for each side of the candle, so just by rotating, resizing, and changing up colors, you get a lot of mileage out of a handful of candles. The red candles look super different from the white ones! Just by resizing and using a different color! It's great!
Lastly, I need to give a shoutout to the bones and crab parts in this game. Bones look cooler with sharp angles and they take full advantage of that. The blocky silhouette is both pleasing and menacing to look like. They use a lot of big colored splotches and bands to age the bones, and in smaller pieces, they highlight all the varied edges and carved bits with a bit of edge highlight.
The crab anchor isn't precisely a bone but the sculpt is so well done I wanted to put in here Rather than making a round and smooth round pincer they go ham and re-interpret and stylize its planes, and then they do a gorgeous texture work, with big contrasted splotches of color, and the signature subtle color variation. <3
We're almost done! While writing this post I found a neat detail:
I'm 80% sure that this plant is just one of the bigger palm fronds in the game. There ARE individual, smaller plants in the game, but this one seems to be an exception, and it's just super neat and funny to me. I love recycling!
Lastly, this post is lacking in rocks, so here's a type of rock I didn't really feature in my rock post: the rocks at sea! They're a mix between the friendly and scary rocks: there are jagged edges here and there, but they're a bit rounded off. They instill a sense of adventure, in my opinion. They're great to look at!
That's it folks! Thanks again for the support, and for reading my pepe silvia-esque ramblings on small prop details. I feel like hero/bigger props get the most attention in games, which isn't wrong-- a LOT of care and time are put into these models and they deserve the recognition. At the same time, smaller props were also made with a lot of love, but sadly candles or ropes might not look super impressive in a portfolio or marketing post. That's why I wanted to highlight them here!
If you read all this, thank you so much, and here's a lil snippet for you: i'll be doing a write-up on the environment art of Thirsty Suitors next! I got to play the demo this weekend and I need to scream about the art direction.
