Hi guys, thanks for your time for this interview. Could you introduce yourselves?

Hello, my name is Tristan Brett. I am a graduate from the Industrial Design program at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. I have 20 years of creative development experience in the video game industry. In my 10 years at Electronic Arts (1995-2005), my roles included Lead Artist, Designer, Technical Artist and Concept Artist. I have been with Relic Entertainment since 2006-present as a Principal Artist and my current role is lead environment artist on the Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War franchise.

Hi, my name is Roland Longpré. I’m a principal artist here at Relic Entertainment with over 20 years of experience in games (15 of that here at Relic) in roles ranging from Senior Artist on Homeworld 2, environment supervisor on Company of Heroes and Art Director for DOW2. On Dawn of War 3, my role ranged from a tools development role (our Substance Pipeline, for example, used for surfacing our art assets) to mission lighting and map creation & dressing. Before Relic, I was at H2O Entertainment, shipping several titles, the first of which was Tetrisphere for the launch of the the Nintendo 64 twenty years ago.



How did you start using Substance on Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III?

Tristan: I started using Substance Designer in 2010 when it was originally released. My main motivation for using it came mostly from the goals of a lead in that I saw an opportunity for a more efficient texture creation workflow with consistent results. Using traditional 2D texturing methods is slow, inconsistent and doesn’t provide the type of rapid iteration and tuning control that Substance Designer does.



For which aspects of the game did you use Substance?

Tristan: We used Substance Designer for surfacing characters, props and many of our 2D map assets. Substance Painter was used for many of our environment props. Our character pipeline uses a very custom Substance template that lets us tune many individual components. Our environmental assets were built as sets that would share common Substances like stone, concrete and metals. We could easily tune the whole set and see the results in-game very rapidly.