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Hello! Joe from System Era Softworks here to share some news of something that many of you have asked for! Our first game, Astroneer, arrives on PS4 on November 15th and is available for pre-order now! We could not be more excited to join the incredible PS4 lineup and just released a trailer to celebrate!
Create spatial personalities
Now that the announcement is official, we wanted to revisit the process of creating one of the most recognizable elements of Astroneer: our space suits! The Astroneer costume design is a multi-step process, combining not only art and visual presentation, but also animation, to give them all the distinct personalities like this:
For costume design, we worked closely with Heather Penn, conceptual artist and extraordinary 3D artist. Once the first four colors of the game decided, she was commissioned to create a new color series for each type of planet in the game. She ran with this idea and started considering space suits for all the different environments that the astroners might meet on their travels. Heather has assembled this image of the overall workflow, starting with the sketch until the final art in the game:
Heather begins by drawing variants to quickly develop ideas. After refining the sketches in the final version, she then goes on to modeling an approximate silhouette of the main features of the combination to ensure that it works in 3D. Once this is done, she "paints" the 3D shape and then models the final asset from that.
The process
Among the first drawings we saw of the new costumes, there were mood boards with sketches in the approximate silhouette. These mood charts always featured some very interesting images showing the inspiration and themes of the costumes. One of our favorites has incorporated the famous "water bear" photos of a few years ago.
As you can see in the photo above, the inspiration for the Tundra suit comes from microorganisms, diving suits and military style safety armor. Here is another example showing that the Arid design is strongly inspired by the combinations of real life and astronaut clothing:
After a series of comments and approval for the first designs, the real pleasure began. Heather began modeling 3D costumes from concepts. She told us a bit about this process:
"Because I'm a concept artist and a 3D artist, a lot of magic happens when I actually convert it. It is not necessary that the design (2D) is perfect … Which is a bit liberating, because in the translation of 2D to 3D, something is always going wrong. "
The best example of these happy accidents came when modeling the exotic combination. The original sketches were super cute and we liked them a lot, but once in 3D, we realized that it was missing something important: a head!
Astroners need a head to be able to move and shine their headlamps where they look underground … and the body of an exotic combination was also the head. Heather then created an extremely scientific drawing to show the team how she was going to solve this problem:
Once we almost all lost sight of the adorable huge of this masterpiece, she separated the "dome" from the costume to make it a spinning head, which added options. really interesting for animation!
Animate a lot with a little
Once the 3D models are finalized, Gene, our animator, takes over and creates an animation skeleton that matches the body shape of the combination, then begins creating unique versions of all the appropriate animations, such as walks. , races, waves, dance, and so on.
Creating separate and emotional Astroneer combinations is actually a daunting challenge because you never see their faces and none of them speak (apart from the occasional muffled exclamation). But from the beginning of the process, Heather often spoke to the team about the main canons she had developed alongside the creation of the costumes.
In many cases, Gene, our facilitator, followed these tips and then gave each costume the distinct body language to reinforce this tacit personality. For example, Heather told us that she had described the exotic costume as an awkward scientist at the pigeon's feet. If you look at the final animations, this inspiration is undeniably there:
Gene also plays a key role in creating the animations we use in our trailers, like the PS4 ad trailer we recently released. The team loves to be able to use off-the-game content to develop the personality of the Astroneer combinations, while providing players with enjoyable moments where they can see their favorite combinations interact with each other.
Thank you for reading! I hope you had a good look at the fun work done behind the scenes in Astroneer. We look forward to bringing Astroneer to PlayStation fans while continuing to develop it for years to come. The game is now available for pre-order, both digital and physical!
We see each other in the stars.
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