Huey Retrofit

This is what happens when a few Mad Maxian black thumbs get their hands on a broken Huey and a working trophy truck.

I am so thankful to my friends who encouraged me to lay out a proper foundation for this piece, and who gave me a few suggestions and paintovers along the way.

If I have time, I still feel like I would like to revisit this, take off the Christmas tree and comp in a full environment concept. Im a bit doubtful on if I'll get there, but am feeling like it is the right thing for me to do.

Sans Christmas Tree

The Stone Breaker Flagship "Caldera"

The Caldera is the premier stone breaker currently seeing action in the northern territories. 

The Caldera acts as the spearhead for the navy's enforcement detachment. Capable of smashing through into coastal and tidal basins traditionally considered unassailable this breaker can clear a path at speed allowing for a dozen support vessels to follow in its cleared wake.

All cannons are elevated and loaded via mechanical assistance and can fire a variety of projectiles ranging from standard penetrators to explosive rounds that can be lobbed ahead to break up stonepack.

The ship is powered by a captive steam system for primary functions and arrays of sterling engines for auxiliary systems. A large central turbine around the collar of the superstructure also harnesses the strong convection current passed from the hull via heat pipes and acts to force air through the ship at high speeds.

The outer plating is created with an alchemic forging process that creates durable, insulated and most importantly, low reaction steel that molten rock cannot bind to.

This started out as a sketch on the iPad Pro using Procreate. At around the halfway point, the limitations of Procreate for compositing and effects were becoming insurmountable so I transitioned to Photoshop for the remainder which helped the workflow but hurt my time given.

This piece started off in the daytime because I felt like night + lava was a bit overdone on my end. But with the coaxing from some friends, I decided that the more dynamic lighting would be the better decision. All of these changes just added to the time spent waffling around without clear final vision.

  • Be careful turning first-draft sketches into final pieces.
  • The iPad Pro is great, but working on a large piece in 15-minute chunks every few days for over a month is a fast way to lose your vision and perspective on a piece.

LPT: Using Photoshop's Image Generator with Unreal Engine

Just a quick pro tip to anybody making assets (Especially UI) for Unreal and exporting them with Photoshop Generator. Unless you specify a .png quality level, Photoshop will automatically compress the files as much as possible up to and including indexed 8bit color mode.

It turns out that Unreal can't import alpha channels from indexed .png files - so to make everything work you will need to manually mark each layer to export at full quality. To do this, ammend a "32" to the end of the layer asset.

AssetLayer.png > AssetLayer.png32

My Photoshop to Spine asset Pipeline

A few months ago I picked up work at JB Games making art for Grave Danger. I had never used Spine before or animated anything really since a few classes in After Effects about 10 years ago so was coming into everything pretty green.

One element that I needed to create a workaround for in Spine was how the Spine exporter script used Groups to signify "Skins". This meant essentially that I couldn't use layers while painting different sprites because to export you would have to flatten everything.

One possible workaround I considered was turning each sprite (asset) into a smart object. This would let me have as many layers as I wanted but still allow the Spine exporter to read the 'flat' layer correctly. The problem with this method is that when you are working on a character comprised out of 20 smart objects, your painting flow gets really broken up when you can't quickly jump around adding and tweaking all elements at once.

Below is my solution. It could be wrong, it could be unnecessary because I missed something - or because Spine has since gotten an update - however, It worked out really well for me here and in a few other odd pipelines for the project.

Hopefully, somebody will find it helpful!