Day of the Tentacle — mix2colors

This fun little project began as a way to improve my Unreal Engine knowledge, focusing on its lighting and shading systems, particularly the new substrate materials. The goal was to transform and reinterpret this iconic Day of the Tentacle screenshot into a plasticine-like style.

As a license holder for both ZBrush and Substance Painter, I have focused all my modelling and texturing efforts within these two packages

I kept all the assets within a single ZBrush scene to ensure proper scale and placement, and used FBX as a format of choice to move the data across the pipeline

In Substance Painter, I modified and blended existing materials, such as concrete and clay, to achieve the desired look, and mostly used constant colors and soft edge treatment to achieve the desired look

Now for the fun part: importing all the assets into UE5.6 and positioning, shading, and lighting the scene.

I have ended up reworking the layout to better fit the composition, and went back and forth btw ZBrush,SP and UE a few times in order to improve and update the assets.

Likely the pipeline in place was quite fast and flexible to deal with these sort of updates.

Shading wise, I’ve used the same substrate slab across the entire scene. This approach gave me the freedom to focus on the lighting and the overall mood of the image

Lighting wise, I opted for an "old school" approach, avoiding path tracing and IBLs. This forced me to be more creative with light placement and colors.

Here's a breakdown of all the lights used in the scene.

Light spin

High-resolution image — right-click and open in a new tab to see it in all its glory!

Having spent most of my career working on photorealistic creatures and characters, I find it quite refreshing and relaxing to explore a completely different style of work, especially within the limitations of a real-time engine and the softwares at my disposal.

I hope you enjoyed this brief behind-the-scenes, and thank you for taking the time to check it out.

Fabio