Technical Post - A Tithe in Blood Kabuki CG

Meowdy everyone, it's adi! I hope you have all been well!!! It's been (checks clock) YEARS since the last technical post that I've done...! I promise you I've been a busy adi during that time!!!

We're making really good progress on A Tithe in Blood, and the visual side of things is nearing end of production, which is really exciting! We were discussing what we could share, and while we have quite a few more CGs completed, they're more on the spoiler side of things and we wanted to keep them a surprise until you get to that point and can look at the illustrations with the context. I'm incredibly proud of them, though, and I'm excited for everyone else to see them!

Like Please Be Happy, we have key illustrations by the character designer kobuta. If you've played the demo, you'll have encountered a few! As always, kobuta does an incredible job, and there's a few more in the full game that are gorgeous! In between the event art by kobuta, moekki and I have done some more illustrations to help tell the story of A Tithe in Blood. The first three scenes are a bit heavy in CG load compared to the rest of the game, having three kobuta drawn illustrations and two by us, as we had quite a lot to establish. Today I wanted to go in depth on the workflow process of one of these CGs!

If you've played the demo, you may remember this - right after the kabuki performance of the Chūshingura, Yasue takes a bow, proud of her work, and displaying her grand feat of magic.

If I'm honest, what I remember when seeing the write-up was 'oh no', and 'oh god' and then maybe 'that's not going to happen'. L-let me explain!!

Originally, the CG was to illustrate the kabuki play itself. Both of us artists were not familiar with kabuki plays or Chūshingura, so trying to be respectful and accurate was a source of stress, doubly so in a Meiji era setting. The quality of references was not very high, and the clothing and actions were very specific. After the play, there was a variant for actors in a line, with Yasue in the centre, and then a variation where all the actors were gone.

I remember looking for videos where actors were bowing, but most resources don't document the curtain call, just the performance itself. One video I found wasn't of the show we needed, and it was in such low quality. It's also... a lot of actors. It's a lot of characters!!

With some discussion, we decided to reduce down the scope of the illustration to just the curtain call, and highlight the focus on Yasue's pride as a play director.

Here's a bunch of my sketches to try and proof of concept the CG, and try and figure out a composition that was realistic but still had all the elements it needed to have. We talked a lot about how to handle the play itself, and we spent a few days looking for traditional art prints of Chūshingura. Another thing that complicated this was that there's several acts to Chūshingura, and prints depicted a lot of different shows, so we sorted through a lot to find the right moments being depicted to align with the text in the script. I remember trawling through some old Japanese sites and learning of this fact...

One of the materials I used for the clothing reference was this video. The best curtain call I could find was... the Star Wars Kabuki show... Portland State University had a very complete rendition of the show we needed?!

Papaya's directing of the play itself truly blew my mind when I saw it in the build, with how the audio and prints came together!!! If you haven't played the demo yet - the direction is incredible, I highly recommend you do.

So with the play section sorted, we focused on getting the curtain call side done. Of the thumbnails above, we landed on the final one, and cleaned that up some.

Moekki's pass of the thumbnail I had done.

A more detailed sketch over that pass with details from the costuming, and trying to match closer to kobuta's art style for Yasue.

Lighting draft. I personally love going to musicals, and I wanted to capture some of the magic and glow that I feel at a curtain call! I also made the decision to give Yasue a little bit of sweat to show that this is a strenuous activity, and I think enhance the sense of pride and hard work.

 Linework.

I then applied shading to the characters under the lineart... 

 And a little bit over, as well as layer effects and glows.

I then painted a quick background, but I kept it rough since I planned to blur it...

 Like so, and add more effects to give it a sense of atmosphere.

 And then putting it all together, you get the CG! After this I did a few variants - stuff you can see once you play the demo 😉

A bit less exciting, but I painted the curtain too.

So that's how the CG came together! Our collaborative CGs may have differences in some steps - we pass them back and forth pretty freely, but usually it involves Moekki layout and me doing the lineart/colouring. It's been a lot of fun working on the illustrations with another artist!

If you haven't already and you're interested in more news about A Tithe in Blood, please consider wishlisting the game on Steam! It really helps us out a lot!!