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3D Prop Artist, VFX-Artist
Blender, Unreal, Substance Painter/Designer
Started 01.10.2025 ~ 6 Months
9
In Project Hammerfall, a rebellious engineer rises from the shadows of a dystopian world: her hammer as heavy as her fury, stronger than any machine.
In this 3rd-person action RPG, you are the spark of a rebellion—forged from anger, courage, and steel.
Background
Project Hammerfall is a game project currently in development. It is set in an alternative post-communist setting with a science-fiction flair, while the main technology revolves around magnetism. I am responsible for prop design and all VFX effects.
In the beginning, we started iterating on the art style. We wanted to create a painterly look without having to hand-paint every texture. I created a master material in Substance Designer to capture this painterly aesthetic. Our main reference was Arcane.
Inside Substance Painter, the material offers multiple customization options. You can adjust three primary colors, as well as two secondary colors for highlights and two secondary colors for darker areas. The scratches are fully customizable in thickness, amount, and color.
Additionally, the material includes a level-based setup for roughness and metallic maps, allowing precise control over the surface properties. The normal map intensity can also be adjusted to fine-tune the overall depth and detail.
Some other assets that were textured with the same master material:
After iterating further, we eventually settled on a simpler and less noisy art style inspired by Valve’s Deadlock:
Not only did we iterate on the art style, but we also refined the sci-fi aspect and how we wanted to represent it in the prop design.
We ended up taking a magnetic approach to our sci-fi elements since the main protagonist already uses that technology in combat.
Disclaimer:
This project is still a work-in-progress and will be updated as time goes on. None of the assets are final.