The Hand Painted Textures of HoopWorld

Hoopworld is an older project I worked on – but the stylized textures still hold up very well. Here’s a first batch of them.

I have all this work lying around here ready to go for years… but I understand why I procrastinated: It’s a loooot to put together. I think I can make four or five postings – including some tutorials about the style and how we did the textures.

Hoopworld Oasis

Let’s start with a pretty picture of the oasis level. Later the game went through a lot iterations of the layout because of the gameplay.

First I want to give an overview – showing different elements and how the look came together. Here is a level, first as concept and later how it looked in the game. The idea was to transport the painted look straight through.

Level concept to ingame look

Here is a good example how the game went from concept to game – while trying to keep the painted look throughout.

For that we also painted the textures without using photos as is more common in game production. Here are some of the rocks I made for the level above.

Painted rock texture

A painted rock texture.

Painted cobble stone texture

And a cobble stone texture.

Stylized painted textures

Here is an overview over some of the textures I did for the game. I’ll show some more and add a step-by-step for creating this style in a later article.

The background were these tiling textures. But the process was similar for the objects: More details and effects on the texture, less on the mesh.

painted leaf textures

Plant textures for the jungle on top of the article.

Painted Plant textures ingame

A view of how the plant textures look in the game.

We did the characters in the same way – with a special shader that limited the interference from local lights. Lot’s of this work was done by Hector Moran – including the concept for this character. The mesh is (if I remember correctly) by Renier Banninga, and I did the texture.

Chief - stylized Texture

The Chief – one of the characters playing the tough version of basketball.

handpainted character texture

The three texture sheets for the character.

Chief - stylized Character

Other view of the character showing of some of the stylized effects and details, like the swirly knuckles