The Making of Disco Elysium - Part Four: Art

Quick Overview

The art of Disco Elysium is fundamentally a study in painting, utilizing techniques like composition, light and shadow, and edge hierarchy, all implemented through a custom pipeline leveraging Blender and Photoshop tiles combined with virtual texturing techniques to bring the still isometric image to life.

Key Points: Aleksander Rostov claims that Disco Elysium is obviously about painting, incorporating portraiture, landscape, and metaphysical portraiture, with dialog framings resembling comic-book compositions. The art team was small, consisting of a couple of artists, one animator, a 3D guy, and contributors, with Rostov's painterly style serving as the visual fulcrum for the project. Rostov developed his style through autodidactic practice, grinding anatomy, drawing from memory, and learning fundamental painting concepts, contrasting his internet-informed learning with older generations' limited resources. The development team used Unity and Blender, setting up a pipeline where Blender color-blocked scenes, rendered maps (color, normal, height), which Rostov then painted over in Photoshop, achieving the painterly integration with 3D elements. To manage the massive scale, described as 10 gigapixels of texture information for Martinaise exterior, the team used Amplify Texture 2 for virtual texturing to avoid loading screens, simulating id Software's megatextures approach. Character portraits function as focused studies in subjectivity, using symbolism, shape (e.g., Kim's roundness vs. Jean's rectangle), and lighting to manipulate player emotion, aiming for a psychological depth akin to Velázquez's work. The team deliberately used tricks like simulating fog of war as a vignette that 'snakes' through cracks in the painterly ground texture to combat the stillness of the isometric image and bring life to the environment.

Context: This segment, Part Four of a documentary series on Disco Elysium, focuses exclusively on the artistic development of the game, featuring key interviews with artist Aleksander Rostov and programmer Siim Raidma. The discussion centers on Rostov's artistic philosophy, the technical pipeline used to merge 3D assets with a painterly 2D aesthetic, and the specific techniques employed to create the game's iconic isometric look and character portraits.