Inspiration

"To both complement Team Fortress 2's exaggerated gameplay and differentiate ourselves from the modern photorealistic look of most other multiplayer action games, we chose to employ an art style inspired by early- to mid-20th-century commercial illustration alongside 1960s industrial design elements. Specifically, we drew inspirartion from the styles of commercial illustrators such as JC Leyendecker, Dean Cornwell and Norman Rockwell. These artists were known for illustrating characters using strong, distinctive silhouettes with emphasis on clothing folds, and they tended to use shading techniques which accentuated the internal shape of objects and characters while emphasising silhouettes with rim highlights rather than dark outlines. The nine character classes of Team Fortress 2 were designed to be visually distinct from one another. Even when viewed only in silhouette with no internal shading at all, the characters needed to be readily indeitifiable to players. For elements of the world associated with each of the two teams, blue and red, we defined specific contrasting properties to set them apart. While the red team's base tends to use warm colours, wooden materials and angular geometry, the blue team's base is composed of cool colours, industrial materials and orthogonal forms. We also deliberately avoided modelling the world in an overly complex or geometrically off-kilter manner, as this would add an unnecessary level of visual noise — not to mention memory-hungry vertices — to the scene. We found that keeping repetitive structures such as the bridge trusses, telephone poles or railroad ties to a minimum is preferable for our style, as conveying the impression of repetition in the space is more important than representing every detail explicitly. In general, the texture maps used on the 3D world are impressionistic, meaning that they are painterly and maintain a minimum level of visual noise. This is consistent with the style of painting used on background plates in many animated films, particularly those of Hayao Miyazaki, in whic broad brush strokes appear in perspective as if present in the 3D world rather than on the 2D image plane. Miyazaki also influenced the game's world and character colour palette." — Charlie Brown, project lead

Art and technology

"Valve is a goal-driven technology company, and game and visual design goals drove Team Fortress 2's technology requirements. Its unique look relies on artistic decisions made before the technology was implemented. For instance, a phong/rim-lighting shader was created specifically to help the characters 'pop' out of the environments. It removes detail in colour and then adds detail back in as highlights, giving the characters a stylised look that's simple yet sophisticated." — Charlie Brown

Bold outlines