‍PanzerDogs is our 3v3 Tank Brawler. In the game the players battle it out against each other in their own tank. Every tank has its own stats, effects and a unique look. But there is a whole journey that each tank parts travels before players can use it in the game.^‍

 ^{The Idea}

Before we start to get our hands dirty, we need to set up some essential rules for setting up the art style and how we are going to arrange everything.

1. Tank pieces are changeable: top/mid/bot.

In the GARAGE panel of the PanzerDogs, players can choose different tank parts from their current library and get more tank pieces when they spend more time playing new matches in the game or attend new seasons of a specific theme. This would be a total freedom for players to customize their favorite tank combination and play it during the battle.

For the artist's side, we need to remember to separate tanks into three pieces vertically. Each tank piece should also be considered a way to better fit with other tank pieces so that there’s a size and design restriction when we model the tanks. Also, we need to test how much the tank pieces could match with each other and adjust the positions frequently for better showing the most beautiful arts for players.

2. Use pixel art as main style

The art style for PanzerDogs was set up as ‘’pixel’’ since this is a very appealing style for our eyes. Pixel art means that we have more limited color amounts that can be used for the texturing.

For the tank itself, the lighting source also comes from the colors rather than real light being calculated in the game engine. It will influence how we are going to paint textures on the tank mesh. For example, in the color palette, we use a middle color tone for the basics. Then we put some brighter and darker colors on it to simulate the sunlight coming from the top as a big nature so that it’s always brighter colors on top front of the mesh and shadows at back button. This painting way can simply make the tank arts even pop up from the background.

                                                                 (If you look carefully on the turret, you will see the gradient of the color changing details

Concepting

Here’s the first step for really working on forming the basic shapes for tank pieces. We use PureRef to collect references from Artstation, Behance and Pinterest websites to get inspired from current amazing works. We need to transfer all different styles from the references into the art style we used for the game to keep the uniform nice looking.

We tried to keep the tank meshes as simple as possible but still have nice design on it. Based on the rarity, we put different design ideas on the tanks as well. In general, the higher rarity of the tanks, the cooler designs could be there.

As a 3D artist, I always feel so excited to design more special tanks for the game and can’t wait to release them to players. There’s a long journey for making a tank from start to the end. And if players love it so much, there won’t ever be an end at all.

Modeling

For making the tank pieces, we always start from a default cube in Blender. We delete the default light and camera then focus on the cube to make it look much better than just a single cube stays lonely in the world. Then, we will use all modeling tools and press all amazing shortcuts in Blender to make things out.

Because most of the tanks are mirrored in the X axis, we will use a ‘’mirror modifier’’ in Blender. In this situation, we will only need to model one side of the mesh then this useful modifier will mirror the result to the other side for saving some modeling time.

It’s a magic process to make the mesh from a cube to something meaningful for the game. We currently have multiple designs of the tanks. Even though those tanks which are rarity set up as common, they still look awesome for me.

UV Unwrapping

For making the texture appear on the surface of the mesh, we need to work on a special workflow in 3D called ‘’UV Unwrap’’. Imagine when we play the paper carves art, we make a piece of paper into many smaller pieces then fold it up with each other to create a whole three dimensions result in the end. UV Unwrap is the exact reverse way of doing it. We cut some lines on the mesh edges and make the 3D mesh into 2D paper.

This step is for helping the 3D software understand which color we paint on the texture should show up on where on the mesh. It can still be adjusted during the texture part later on to better fit the patterns we’d like to paint on the certain positions of the tank mesh pieces.

Texturing

We mainly use Aseprite software for texturing because this is a powerful tool for making pixel art. We also use an add-on called ‘’Primbambase’’ for both Aseprite and Blender.

This add-on plays a role of the bridge between two software. It’s pretty useful for artists to see what the texturing result looks like on the mesh immediately. In this case, we don’t need to paint in blind and do export & import textures to see the result then go back to revise the textures again. It’s a very useful tool for avoiding unnecessary back and forth checking work and saving a lot of time during the process.

Exporting

From Blender and Aseprite to the game engine, we need to export meshes and textures as FBX and PNG files. Then import them into the game engine for later setting up.

There are some technical steps we need to do before exporting meshes from Blender such as making sure the position/rotation/scale are correct, making outlines by using back culling techniques, and putting meshes in the center of the world.

In-Game

The players can customize special tank combinations for themselves in the GARAGE panel including top, mid and bot of the tank pieces.

The tanks style will also match with the game field pretty much. Even the VFX such as bullets were also made with pixel art.

Technical notes

Extremely Optimization for both meshes & texture

Here’s the most important two things from the art side that we could do for reducing the size of the mesh and texture files.

• Sorting out the geometry - Because the game is launching on the web and mobile devices for now, we need to make sure from the art side we can do the most work to make it suitable for the platform. It means we need to save resources on matter sections and abandon those not important parts. So for the geometry, we can delete unseen faces inside of meshes since it won’t have any chance to be seen by players in the game. We can also merge vertices if those movements won’t influence the shape of the tank mesh.
• Using pixel textures- The texture resolution for each tank part is only 128*128 which is a tiny size. In this way, it can help the game engine to load the scene with a lot of textures easily and even faster. Art style is a choice option but also a way to optimize the whole scene with correct size of the texture images.

Colors dynamic change methods

In the game, we don’t paint all color variations manually. We use a smart method to deal with this problem which is how we can make color variety more effective than ever.

First of all, we use a default color palette to paint on the new tanks. It will be exact the same when we see it in the game.

Second, we transfer the default normal color into the NoCol file as the lead image. It can change to different color settings in the game engine automatically just like magic. In this case we don’t need to have multiple different color textures and it’s also much easier for us to add new color sets in the future since we only need to set up a new color palette then the game engine will do the rest of the work for us.

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About the Author: Ya Wen Huang

Ya Wen Huang is the Game Artist at Lucky Kat Studios and is part of our Panzerdogs team.

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