by Eladrin Hello everyone! Today the art team will show you some of the amazing stuff coming in The Machine Age on May 7th. It's available for pre-purchase now, on its own or as part of Stellaris: Season 08. I'll turn it straight over to them!

The Art of the Machine Age (Part I)

Hello! My name is Felix and Im one of the concept artists working on The Machine Age ascension pack for Stellaris. In this dev-diary, were very excited to present some art from the new playable species and shipsets that are coming with the DLC. A ton of work has been put in by everyone on the art team, and were thrilled to finally be able to show you some!

Portraits

Reactive portraits For the Machine Age, we decided the current system needed improvement to achieve the experience we wanted for ourselves and the players. This resulted in, among other things, an improvement to our portrait system that now allows you to see your species' cyberization progress through several stages. We have also made an entire set of ascended synthetic portraits that share close ties to their biological predecessors, to address players not feeling as connected with their new metal bodies.
A look at one of our final species for Cybernetics (three ascending stages).
Here is a look at one of our synthetic species, going from organic to fully robotic. Inspiration We saw a lot of potential in making the cybernetic species relatable and letting their augments shine by adding to the current familiar lineup of species that are already in the game. Some designs started with their characters, while others evolved around a specific idea for a cool cybernetic augment. It was important for us to have as many different components as possible and create a unique and diverse array of species.
A snippet of different ideas for the cybernetic species development, a few from very early and some close to final. Early character concepts and development When brainstorming portraits ideas for this pack, we took a lot of cues from earlier species and tried to add a few in each category. Since the main show is the cybernetics and robotic parts, we felt like it was best to go with already familiar traits when working out the designs, putting the focus on the cyberization and synthesization of the different species. Here are some early sketches that we went through on our way to the final portraits.
Concept art for some early species development.
More concept art for some early species development. Cant believe this is the first moose inspired species, as a Swedish developer!
More early species development. After we nailed down the look and development of the base characters we worked on the variations and uniforms for each of them, some species have the same uniform and some have unique setups that change after synthetic ascension. This DLC also features some freshly made humans, and yes, they have new hairstyles!
New human portraits, ready for a journey down the cyber path. Challenges Getting to this point proved quite a challenge, with plenty of limitations to overcome. Making conditional assets work within the game engine and the randomly generated nature of stellaris species required input from programmers, animators and multiple artists. Eventually we landed on a system that would mostly keep our current workflow intact, although with a much larger asset library to manage. In general, we were able to freely place assets where we wanted with only a few limitations holding us back. Below is an example of the process we call paperdolling, where species are cut up and exported to be reassembled with animation. This must be done for every color change, hairstyle, cybernetic piece and outfit per species, all of which needs to work together.
Example of the portrait paper doll workflow, with the implementation of masking out parts of the base character when the cybernetic augments are present. An assembled version of the same species can be seen below.
What we are left with after The Machine Age is an exciting update to the portrait system that we are eager to use going forward. We hope you enjoy the work we put into these, either as you slowly upgrade your way to a cybernetic society, or ascend into tailor made synthetic forms. Next up- Lloyd will take you through the journey of designing the cybernetic and machine shipsets found in The Machine Age!

Shipsets

Hi, Im Lloyd and I'm a concept artist working on Stellaris: The Machine age. I'll be taking you through some of the development process for the two player shipsets in this ascension pack.

Machine Shipset

Finally robots are getting their own dedicated shipset! Because The Machine Age would be incomplete without ships for machines. These ships are designed to appear like they are operated and inhabited by synthetics. On most of the designs you can see an AI core in place of a traditional bridge. They also have far fewer windows than most other ships, implying a high level of automation. With all that machinery things are likely to get hot, so a key design element for this shipset is large glowing radiators to dump excess heat into space.
The machine shipset. Let's take a deeper look into the design process behind one of these ships, the machine science ship. The first thing we do when starting work on a shipset is establish the general shape language of the pack. Here you can see some early development sketches for the ships.
Early sketches for the machine shipset. Once the visual language has been hashed out we move on to individual ship designs. The science ship is always a fun one to design as it does not have turrets or sections, so there are fewer limitations on the shapes we can use. Here are several stages of the design of the machine science ship.
Development sketches for the machine science ship. Approved sketches are then rendered out into final concepts, showing all the angles that we need.


Final concepts of the machine science ship. With the concept completed we move to 3D. The team turns the design into optimized assets that work with all of the games technical requirements. The science ship was worked on by 3D artist Tim Wiberg. Tim and the rest of the 3D team also create the textures for the whole shipset, making sure that we get a consistent look across all ships. For the machine ship textures we wanted to go for a clean, refined, machine-precision look. The hull patterns that change color depending on your empire colours are designed to give the impression of circuitry.
3D work on the machine science ship. After the 3D model is complete there are still a couple steps left. The science ship is one of the few ships in stellaris that has animations, meaning we can add some interesting motion to show the ship doing science. We also need to hook up VFX to have the ship's engines glow correctly.
The machine science ship in-game.

Cybernetic Shipset

Let's have a look at the other shipset in The Machine Age, the cybernetic shipset! Perfect if you're a species looking to mash up your boring biology with some sweet, sweet chrome. For this shipset we were heavily inspired for the shape language of classic cars and retro tech.
The cybernetic shipset. Here are some early sketches from when we were still looking for the style of the ships.

Early sketches for the cybernetic shipset. The following sketches show the development of the cybernetic battleship. You can see at this point the shape language of the pack has been established. Lots of blocky shapes with rounded corners were used to give these ships a sense of strength and toughness.
Development sketches of the cybernetic battleship. Heres the final concept for the Cybernetic battleship - affectionately known to the art team as the flattleship. You can see that as Stellaris warships are modular, we have to design a bunch of different sections that all have to fit together. It's quite fun but it adds a lot of time and problem solving to the process. One of my favorite features of the cybernetic battleship is the hangar mid-section which has an aircraft-carrier-like ramp for the strike craft to launch from.
Final concept of the cybernetic battleship. Warships are also more complicated on the 3D side, where the multiple sections have to be modeled to all be compatible with each other. We also have to take into account turrets, which need to fit with enough clearance, and accommodate both projectile and missile launchers. For the textures on the cybernetic ships, we wanted an emphasis on shiny metallics, and a bit more grungy-ness than the synthetic ships. The cybernetic battleship was also modeled and textured by Tim Wiberg.
3D development of the cybernetic battleship. All the cybernetic ships include animated lighting strips that show a pulse of light that propagates down the length of the ship, often forming a character line that resonates with the rest of the design. For the battleship the light strips are either side of the ships central trench.
Thanks for stopping by for this brief look into the portraits and shipsets of The Machine age! We have put so much work into this expansion and we can't wait to see what you think of it. We hope that this little taste of the art has you excited to ascend towards mechanized mastery and conquer the galaxy as a synthetic or cybernetic civilisation in Stellaris!

StellARTis

Hello everyone, Community Manager Aurora here! Were happy to announce that we are holding our second-annual StellARTis competition!
This years theme is Everyday life in The Machine Age. We will be accepting submissions on X (Twitter), the forums, and Discord from now until May 6th at 1300 CEST. You can find out more in the forum thread. We look forward to seeing what our community comes up with!

What's Next

There's so much to show that we'll have another Art of the Machine Age dev diary post-release. Next week's dev diary is The Machine Age and 3.12 "Andromeda" Preliminary Release Notes, and next Thursday at 1430 CEST we will be on /r/Stellaris for a Reddit AMA! See you then!