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Hello everyone! This post is about the look and feel for Red:Out, our brand new title now in development.

I personally love synthesis: simple shapes are sexy, comunicating complex visual messages using the less you can is fascinating and difficult at the same time. When we started thinking to our “racing” game we’ve some clear ideas and some strict limitations: for example, the fact that we’re a small team formed by eight people, fast and skilled, left us with not so much brute firepower. So, embracing simplicity was the right choice to have something cool and doable in a reasonable amout of time.

Low poly graphics is nowadays living a new youth and we love almost every incarnation of it, so why not trying to make something we loved? Besides, running at high speed on a sort of mag-lev futuristic track doesn’t leave you too much time to enjoy normal maps, ultra-fine details and so on. For our first stage, we decided for an evocative location, house of one of the most ancient human civilisations of all time: Egypt. A sort of futuristic Cairo, where the old city becomes seamlessy a high-tech hive-city.

But let me explain better what I think when I use the term “essential shapes”:

Brutal comparison

Seems similar, right?

On the left we’ve got the real Cairo skyline. On the right, a B&W and highly contrasted view from Red:Out.

Final composition with color synthesis and complexity reduction

Final composition with color synthesis and complexity reduction

What we really wanted to catch and express is the feeling of being there. While one of the most common ways to achieve this is to use any sort of photorealistic technique, we preferred to bet everything we had got onto simplification.

Another example.

Another example.

Again, what was important was to communicate the idea of a rock, without being too picky nor too precise about details.

Budello

His education and background are strongly technical, due to a Computer Engineering master degree. He worked both in the game industry and in the movies one; in Los Angeles at Entity Fx and in Milan at Milestone s.r.l.. In his portfolio, Motogp14 for next-gen consoles, the whole WRC series, Michael Jackson's "this is it" VFX and much more.

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