Thomas Söderlund

Ouf, yeah. I have experienced that, too. It throws a wrench into everything. I feel it's quite common to mistake colour correction for some sort of final gloss that you apply to make things "more pretty," instead of fixing issues.

Amazing film, wasn't expecting it to be so grim.

And to clarify further; for me it wasn't so important to go down a nostalgic rabbit hole and be period-correct and dull about it, trying to emulate some sort of extinct banana flavour, but rather do something unexpected stylistically in Unreal Engine, which is provokingly tuned for bland realism.

And your observations are relevant. The overly nostalgic/hyperreal 80's presentation of the game is not what I personally would have gone for, but it probably helps sell units...

Oh no worries, that's the gist I got from it, too. I feel the same way, with ever-shorter cycles of nostalgia and AI-induced aesthetics fatigue which makes everything worse.

No Lumen or GI, no Nanite, etc. But we used distance fields for some ambient occlusion-style effects.

Yeah, there are no stock effects. Halation and (proper) grain simulation are doing most of the work. And maybe just a slight hint of vignetting on top. There's also no tonemapping. The entire pipeline is SDR. The colors you pick are the colors you see.

No chromatic aberration afaik. I left the project a while ago, so maybe they added it, but I'd be very surprised if there was any. Maybe your colleague is referring to the halation effect you can see in some of the shots?

Thanks, man! Yeah, it feels really good, and can't wait to get people's eyes on the rest of the game. There's just so many subtle nerdy details in there (like the fact that cels often cast a slight shadow on the background painting, which we recreated)
Artbook at some point feels likely :)

Orbitals' tech art director here :) "80s anime style" fits a lot of different styles, same with the statement "80s comics style". And I wouldn't say we were apeing, it's more of a love letter to an aesthetic so shaped by the constraints of the medium, in particular the backgrounds.

Hey, Orbitals' Tech Art Director here. I did all the anime cel+painted shaders, tech and tools. Nothing baked, nothing painted. Lit in realtime, custom Unreal build for more control. Main pass is only writing to modified gbuffer layout. _Everything_ happens in postprocess stages.