Since GDEX, I’ve been trying to implement some of the suggestions that people gave me during the course of their play sessions. One of the ones that had stuck was people mentioning the style of the terrain didn’t quite match that art style of the props and characters. Since my sonĀ drew most everything in crayon, it seemed natural to make the terrain look like it was colored in crayon as well.
The trick is how to make it look that way.
I tried a number of Photoshop and Krita filters and combinations of filters and layers to try and approximate a crayon look. Which looked pretty lame, in the end. Most of them had a very fake, algorithm digital plastic feel. Trying to do it by hand with crayon or pastel brushes in Photoshop would take a long time. Almost wish I could unwrap the mesh and have the kids color it.
Then I realized I could.

I realized that if I exported the UV’s from Blender, opened it in Photoshop, used the wand tool to select the empty area around the UV islands, expand the selection, invert and clear – I had a pretty good outline that I could color with Prismacolor pencils, sharpened to a fine point and scanned back in, would look like crayon.
The above video gives a pretty good idea of where this is going – after asking folk online, it seems the crayon concept agrees with a lot of people. When I started adding effects from the Post Processing Stack (vignette and Depth of Field) its starting to give the whole game a brand new look and feel – more on that in the future.