We, artists, at Project Dissonance started running into conflicts of how paper should feel and be modeled. Everyone had their own perception and thoughts of how paper should feel or fold, and we needed to get this sorted out as soon as possible. Especially the way how paper can be easily drawn as concept art but converting into a 3d mesh and preserving that feel that it is made out of paper is not as easy as it seems.
I immediately started doing different tests on how we should have edges interact. As the main problem were not the faces, but was how the edge interacted with the adjoining faces because paper does not fold razor sharp.
Playing around with the normals did not help either and even though I strictly followed Brice's concept art of the paper craft looking trees, in 3d, it did not look anything like how it paper would look like. We decided that if we would run a paper texture along it, it might just get that paper look!!!
More research was done to establish and well define our art style and we found other games with the paper craft style that were quite successful, we studied and learned the style even more thoroughly as getting the feel of paper was pretty hard.
So after a couple of tests we narrowed down and based our modelling pipeline off it. This modelling pipeline describes specifically on how to achieve the paper craft style, with various (just 2) tools and settings in Maya.
Overall the modelling pipeline went very well and the style was accepted by the entire group.
We ended up mixing an origami style with paper craft. Based on Tian's decision we ended up including small paper tabs protruding into most of our designs and models. I feel this decision is what makes our art stand out from any other paper craft style out there and I feel this was a great decision for the artists of Dissonance.
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