Creative Design with Substance 3D for Google’s Pixel Arena

I’m Andrea Arice, Associate Motion director at Monks, a global marketing and technology services company. We teamed up with Google to launch Pixel Arena, a mobile experience where users can customize their avatar, do trick shots on a virtual court, and engage in multiplayer games.

Beyond the game and experience, there was a true focus on avatar customization. We wanted players to be able to express themselves through their outfit choices. We created six avatars for the mobile game that can be customized with dozens of outfit variations and garments, with additional content unlocking as players reach certain achievements. Players can also combine different top and bottom outfits, accessories, and facial features.

Workflow overview

We started with a concept phase where we designed the outfits. When the concept art was defined, we wanted to keep it open for more creative exploration down the road while we were working in Substance 3D Painter.

So, we started with basic 3D models and outfits in Marvelous Designer, without modeling too many details as we knew we could add in more details in the materials during the texturing phase in Painter.

We had both high-poly and low-poly versions of the models, the former for client reviews and the latter to run in the mobile experience. We exported both versions of the models to Painter, knowing we could leverage the high-res to low-res texture baking tool in Painter.

We used C4D to assign Color IDs to each outfit item, so we could bring them to Painter and have unique layers assigned to each color ID. This way, we could switch between the different garments of the outfit (top and bottom) and the different colorways to see how they would interact. This was super useful as the users would be able to customize their character by switching between these different variations.

Learn more about Maxon One + Adobe Bundles

We have a big internal library of Substance 3D materials, but when we don’t have the specific material we need, the Substance 3D Assets library is a great space to quickly source materials. This helps us save a lot of time.

This workflow allowed us to directly review the variations with the client by sending them dozens of Painter screenshots with different outfit variations. Based on their feedback, we could art direct straight into Painter to make the necessary changes and variations, without having to go back to the concept art phase. This way, we kept things flexible and could quickly make creative iterations directly on the 3D model in Painter.

Before we started using Painter, a similar project that involved character creation and outfit variations took 2 months to finalize. With this new workflow in Substance 3D Painter, two weeks were enough to create 20 assets with five color variations each, with only a team of 3 artists.

We used the low-poly models for the final experience, as it is a mobile game and there are obviously some polycount restrictions. But what was unexpected is that the low-poly models were high quality enough thanks to the Substance 3D materials being both so lightweight and highly detailed.

When viewing the low poly models in C4D, the 8K textures looked so crisp that we didn’t have to use the high poly models. All the assets you see in the marketing material, including the cinematic, renders and even close ups, were made with the low polycount models.

That also sped up the process a lot, as we didn’t have to create a high-res version of the models just for the commercial and media imagery. Finally, we exported the files from Cinema 4D to After Effects thanks to the plugin to work on the final cinematics.

What’s next?

I'm a fashion designer in my spare time and created a digital brand called Fake. So, I usually upload my designs to Adobe Firefly to generate new variations quickly with generative AI. In a recent project, I generated 20 variations of the same shoe with different materials. That's what blows me away, it opens a world of possibilities.

We are also exploring and testing the integration of USD into our pipeline. We are now moving files between Cinema 4D, Maya, Substance, Unreal Engine, and to have a single export file, that’s of course our dream. Furthermore, we are working with so many different teams and sometimes you have a team that works in Blender, another team that works in Maya, and you still must rebuild the shader if you're using Octane in Cinema 4D or any kind of different engine.

I've been such a huge fan of Substance. When Painter came out, I started using it, and it became part of my daily life for work and personal projects. Working with Substance is a kind of mindset. You don't need to have everything in the geometry, but you can add so many details in the textures and the normal map. It saves so much time, and that makes me happy.