How did you start using Substance on Prey?

We first considered Substance Designer in late 2013, after our fellow environment artists in Lyon gave us a few demos of what they had been experimenting with on their assets for Dishonored 2. Being developers in France, they had been familiar with Allegorithmic for some time. After that, our principal character artist (at the time) and I evaluated Substance Designer, and we decided to select it over the competitors in early 2014.

This was very early in production, and we were working to develop our own unique visual style for Prey, and what was apparent to us right from the get-go was that the node-based sandbox nature of Substance Designer allowed us to create a wide range of textures very quickly. This allowed us to explore and experiment with a lot of ideas. We started to hone in our style pretty quickly, and together with the use of Photoshop, really refined it over time to what you see today.



For which aspects of the game did you use Substance?

For environment art, we used Substance Designer. However, Substance Painter was used together with Substance Designer for characters and weapons.



Was your usage of Substance different or similar according to the types of asset you worked on (Environments/Characters/Weapons)?

I’ll let our character artist Billy Lord and weapons artist Tim Alexander explain their side before I sum it up:

Billy Lord [character artist, Arkane Austin] – Character assets vary greatly, although they all share a similar approach in technique. For character heads, I would start with a base skin material (spec and gloss) that I created and then layer on color in a traditional, hand painted method. Substance Painter’s layers and blending modes allowed me to work in a fluid, non-destructive way to add a unique look to each character while still maintaining a consistent style. For costumes, I loved having the ability to seamlessly (no pun intended) switch from Substance Designer to Substance Painter to edit the garment materials to suit not only art direction, but the game needs as well. The masking ability of Substance Painter is crucial to making decisions on the fly to test different material ideas. Without it, there would have been much more painful iteration.