Anarchy Online Armor Sets

One of my first projects for Funcom’s Live Games team was to create some new armor sets for Anarchy Online. Despite the game being nearly 20 years old, my lead wanted to leverage my Zbrush and Substance experience to give these a more modern look.

I had a few things to keep in mind- they would need to be baked down to a pre-existing avatar model (all of roughly 800 polygons), but the back, shoulder, and helmet pieces could be modeled from scratch. They also used only diffuse maps, so no normal maps and no PBR materials. Lastly, things obviously needed to be kept fairly low-resolution and low poly.

With all of that in mind, I was able to use a pretty standard high-to-low poly workflow on these. The sculpted details had to be pretty chunky, and use large bevels to capture edge detail in the normal map bakes since the low poly mesh wasn’t helping much. I often exaggerated some of the larger forms to capture surface lighting information. Design-wise, I had to learn what shape language would both look good and actual bake properly. When needed, I would do separate sculpts for the other player races and genders to get things to bake properly (the female torso was often very problematic to deal with).

In Substance Painter, had to use several tricks, but it was the “Baked Lighting Stylized” material which was fundamental to getting the normal information into the diffuse maps. I exported several maps and put them together in Photoshop to achieve the final diffuse textures.

These were all really fun projects. The sculpts didn’t require much refinement, so they were quick to execute. I did many of these without concept art, which allowed me to just explore and have fun. I was fairly new to Substance Painter when I started, so I was able to learn a lot doing these. The results were sometimes a bit janky as we figured out what worked and what didn’t, but we ended up quite happy with the look of these. Professional work isn't always flashy, but you do the best you can within the constraints of the project.

The Kryoguard concept art was done by Lindsey Laney- https://www.lindseylaney-portfolio.com/