The blue channel was originally just to add silt being kicked up but ended up used for more general long-lasting interations. It's used to carve out a path in the surface debris and the normal derived from this channel allows us to push the UVs apart a bit so it feels like you're moving it around.

lo-fi asset + hi-fi rendering
- looks amazing
- 10x cheaper to produce
- much more performant
- not limited to pixel art

Credit to @timsoret.bsky.social for teaching this lesson back on X:

A quick, simple, and nondestructive way to check your art's values is to create a new layer > fill it with black > change the blending mode to "color" or "hue" (for me, they both do essentially the same thing, I am using CSP)

Haven't thought about this one in a long, long time. Colossal Katamari. Probably what most people knew me from before I started working on Owlboy
#pixelart #ドット絵

Work over the past 15 years. (Still trying to get used to Bluesky.)
#photography #art #sciencefiction