Stylized work

Stylized work often comes with a boat of puzzles.

Silhouette design is huge, keeping shapes crisp and structured, and keeping a hierarchy of focal points in your concept.

Having fun in texturing and making up for the loss of model resolution with high detailed textures. And also knowing when to bounce back and forth between modeling and texturing throughout the process to make both the model and texture push each other and ultimately look like your piece is ready to jump off the screen alive!

Optimization

Most of my stylized work is built to constraints for games, so optimization has to be absolute. 1024 textures and models that are often under 5000 tris for characters.

While Creating this style of work it is very important to know when to bounce around between texturing and changing your topology to have both build each other up.

Something many people starting in stylized work don’t realize is how much freedom you have to push and pull your UV’s after you’ve started texturing.

The key process here is:

Get the first pass done on the texturing. Once the texture is looking pretty good, take the model back into the modeling software, then with the diffuse texture applied in the viewport, start removing all topology that is unnecessary for holding silhouette. Tools that have “preserve UV’s” are key here, while moving around vertices.

I will usually pop up triangles just around areas that will show around the silhouette edge of the model, and keep the surface flat for similar detail inside the silhouette.

Here’s an example sword: