Hi everyone, I'm Tristan and I'm the Art Director on Company of Heroes 3. This document was originally posted to the closed CoH-Dev community 3 years ago. While the Art team’s pillars and goals have remained consistent, solutions and associated reference images in this post have evolved from concept to in-game examples.  

There are three pillars that help drive the art vision on Company of Heroes 3. The first Pillar, “Life at War”,  is the primary artistic inspiration. It represents the contrast of Pretty and Gritty and is a common thread throughout the game. In this pillar our aim is to capture the beauty of the Mediterranean and its cultures, making the destruction of it all more impactful.  

“Create life and attachment to contrast loss and destruction” 

The second pillar, “Cinematic Realism” is the style and the how of COH art which includes: 

• WW2 Film influence 
• Cultural Texture 
• Essence Engine 
• Gameplay Clarity

The third pillar "Living Battlefield” is the canvas and the what of COH3 art which includes: 

• Units 
• Animation 
• Environments 
• FX 
• Destruction

CINEMATIC REALISM - WW2 FILM INFLUENCE 

The Company of Heroes franchise has always been influenced by WW2 film, CoH1 with Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, and CoH2 with movies like Enemy at the Gates. CoH3 is influenced by films such as Fury for its authenticity, Inglorious Basterds for its attitude and the influence of the Devils Brigade and Dunkirk for their human storylines, and the many documentaries surfacing with newly found or released color 16mm footage.  

“ Company of Heroes will capture the essence of movies like Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan…” - COH 1 

“Influenced by WW2 film and documentaries like Fury, Dunkirk, Inglorious Bastards, and Thunderbolt…” - CoH 3 

"Cinematic action in the Mediterranean" – Company of Heroes 3 game Pillar

Apart from the cinematic experience in Company of Heroes 3 this influence is often reflected in key art, concept, presentation, and cinematics. 

CINEMATIC REALISM - CULTURAL TEXTURE 

Cultural texture is a term we use to define the audio-visual cues that describe a culture and its surroundings. This is the research portion of our process of defining the cultures, flora, fauna, and geology of the Mediterranean. Italian cultures and their locations evolved over hundreds of years producing one of the most colorful and accomplished people and places in the world. 

We hope to present these cultural influences through our armies, battlegroups, civilians, animals and environments. We will feature both sides of the Italian war effort along with narratives that explore the amazing stories of the time. Maps feature organic town layouts with a variety of artistic influences, build as you grow architecture, and geological features like verticality that tie into gameplay. 

We explored many facets of cultural textures through concept and continued research. Detailed concepts like these are invaluable for iterating on ideas while defining them for production. They have also been a valuable tool in the Coh-development program, in which we’ve received good constructive feedback and catches along the way. We'll be releasing much of our individual concept art here over time, These assembled images are meant to give a broad overview of our process.

(Note: For a closer view of the concept images below, right-click and open the image in a new browser tab.)

CINEMATIC REALISM - ESSENCE ENGINE 5 

Essence engine 5 is the latest iteration of Relics powerful engine, some of the new features include; 

• PBR (physically based rendering) improved both our asset and scene rendering to feel more realistic than before at 4K resolution 
• Unit “Paperdoll” (customizing) asset system with a fully integrated substance texturing pipeline 
• Higher poly and object limits than previous versions resulting in detailed worlds, destruction, and units  
• A new, fully 3D destruction system “Destruction 2.0” 
• Integrated LOD system with Simplygon giving us detailed vistas and out of bounds areas 
• Multi-layered dynamic shaders for real-time damage and weathering

Some of our shader and rendering features are still in development and not yet featured in many of the screenshots and videos. We will be posting updates as these features are implemented. 

CINEMATIC REALISM - GAMEPLAY CLARITY 

This area can be a challenge for more realistic RTS games like Company of Heroes, a game that also strives for authenticity which typically has units blending into the environment. Our goal is to create a Visual hierarchy of the individual elements by changing their form, detail, tone, saturation, and opacity to provide a clearer picture of the action. 

Frequency of detail and Contrast are used to highlight units and pathing. Our units are designed with light and dark elements to stand out on a variety of terrain. More noise signifies harder to navigate concealed areas while less noise and contrast provides a clear path but negative cover in many cases. 

Silhouette and Animation can highlight unit types, objectives, and their current states through form and posing 

Color grading is used to highlight the action and silhouettes by controlling contrast and saturation  

Features like color grading and team color are still work in progress as tools are still in development. Different atmospheric situations require specific adjustments while tuning and polish continue through development. We are also considering exposing some grading features in our settings like color filters.  

Stay tuned for a follow-up post from the Art team where we’ll be discussing how we capture the Living Battlefield!

Amazing post!
That first Image of the Life at War is exactly what I was expecting from CoH3!
But that is where the Official KeyArt drops the hotpot, it has a very stylized take compared to the above!
It 's really opening an unfortunate mis-interpretation of your goals! ;)

Thanks a thousandfold for sharing this! As an art director myself I'm extremely excited by those boards & to see how the weathering & atmospheric shading will influence the feel of the game as the battle rages on!

One question is, will we have huge clouds of smoke from burning fire or bombardments clouding the sunlight as is expressed in the Life at War poster? Having impactful particle simulations is always fascinating, World in Conflict pioneered on this but was never followed up by any engine or game.... And that was so long ago! x)

Cheers!

Great info @Tristan_RE! Nice to see the concept art and the design principals you've established.

I especially like Life at War: “Create life and attachment to contrast loss and direction”. Looking forward to seeing how you blend all this together and walk the line between enhanced stylized elements and gritty realism.

Best of luck to you and the team :-)

FilipeREP wrote:

This is really incredible, @Tristan_RE. I see a lot of photos of the French troops and an Osprey reference fro the British uniforms (hell, I even spotted Simone Segouin). The partisans look amazing and authentic. The architecture and the sky really convey the idea of a peaceful place suddenly disturbed by war.

I would like to see examples of propaganda posters, especially those by fascist Italy.

Thanks for the feedback @FilipeREP . We are planning on adding fascist propaganda, We are also adding stenciled/painted graffiti of "IL DUCE/DUX" and "Vincere!" seen frequently on walls and monuments 

It's amazing to hear back from you Tristan! ;)
I'm really enthralled by the whole production & communication you have put in place at here! After all CoH has proven to be my all time favorite RTS. I just can't stop the addiction x)

It seems indeed to be a lot of noise around the visual!

I would say one thing that concerns both this key art & the in-game rendering, the image is so bright & saturated it is hard to look at. The battlefield & units were so bright the game lost it's clarity, I only saw the subtle textures & volumes by zooming in at max. I feel the same with this poster, which is lacking the subtlety of the Life at War contrast. The artistic take is obviously very strong but imo is indeed going a little too far ;)

I should precise, I'm playing on a calibrated Color Grading 4K scope monitor of 32" with a low-contrast gamma curve, HDR was turned off ofc.
But still the image was quite aggressive, and distracting me from the game.
Obviously having this "color filter" option in game & refining the engine will be deciding factors in how subtle it looks, it's great you've went forward with these options ;)

What I always keep in mind, is thinking the image like celluloid. Not because it's film, but because it has this natural quality of feeling rich & saturated without ever being artificial.
It's not a quality we see often in recent years but you mentioned Fury & Dunkirk, both nailed it quiet perfectly, especially Fury. CoH always entertained this celluloid quality, be it bleach bypass or low-exposure brownification x)


There is excellent photos proving this point which is only a color grading issue. I love the poster style, but this composition is quiet hard to read because of that saturation & global lightwrap. It might be stupid, but the characters above are less striking than a stylized composition embracing silhouette, a more contrasted & shaded lighting like the indiana jones poster. I'm sorry, cldn't resist, it's just the best poster in this style to me, sun blazing in the middle!


Thanks a lot for your time! And I hope you're having fun with all that feedback jazz! Cheers :)

Looks awesome, you should be giving advises to age IV art director.

The only think I don't like is the game cover/poster. it lt feels a little bit cartoon may be to bright but game looks awesome, at lest COH3 will have proper graphics but you guys ruined my age IV :(

G0ll0 wrote:

Looks awesome, you should be giving advises to age IV art director.

The only think I don't like is the game cover/poster. it lt feels a little bit cartoon may be to bright but game looks awesome, at lest COH3 will have proper graphics but you guys ruined my age IV :(

Eh, I think Age of Empires 4 looks fine. I like my stylized art styles, though if I had any real criticisms of AOE4, it's that *everything* looks too bright. There's not enough -->contrast<-- to make the eye popping units pop out more and stand out. Basically, I think the units in AOE4 are great as they are, bright and colorful. But if the world looks bright and colorful too, it doesn't help the units stand out.

Games like old school Command and Conquer and early Dawn of War 3 (before the fans whined and complained it looked too cartoony and succeeded in pressuring Relic to making it look boring and dull :/ ) did a great job of having units contrast and pop out from the backgrounds.

Again, I think AOE4 looks fine, and i'm happy we're getting more visually interesting games nowadays instead of everything trying to be rEaLiStiC and GriTtY. Just my two cents on how 'cartoony' visuals work better when there's contrast.