The Brood, painted: before and after the art pass

· M8 · The realm under siege

The Brood went into the world as blockouts: the right shapes and sizes, in flat colours. Every post since has said an art pass was queued. It has landed, and the pictures below are the same scenes before and after.

The Matriarch at her nest after the art pass: her sac and egg pods glowing violet with pale veins, teal tips on her crown
The Matriarch roaring at her nest, after the pass.

Three new materials

Most of the change comes from three materials the whole Brood now shares. The egg shell is veined and lit from within. The opal chitin is dark plates with a sheen of teal, violet and gold that moves as the view does. The glass is translucent, for wings and sacs. The paintings from the day the Brood was designed were the reference.

The Matriarch's sac and egg pods glow with veins now, and her crown has a violet membrane between the spines, with teal tips. Her nest is a tiered mound with glowing seams of ore and clusters of opal. Shardlings have opal quills. Gloamwings have veined wings of violet glass and a lit lantern. A Lodeback carries a glass sac lit gold, with dark ore packed round a gold heart.

The Brood, before and after

  • Before: the Matriarch's model with a flat pink sac and flat pink podsBefore: her sac and pods in flat pink.
  • After: the Matriarch's sac a glossy violet shell with pale veins, her pods clustered and litAfter: veined shell, lit from within.
  • Before: a Lodeback with a flat yellow sac, a Gloamwing and a Shardling in plain coloursBefore: Lodeback, Gloamwing, Shardling.
  • After: the Lodeback's sac gold glass with ore inside, the Gloamwing's wings violet glass, the Shardling's quills opalAfter: the gold glass sac, glass wings, opal quills.
  • Before: the Matriarch roaring at her nest, her body flat black and pinkBefore: the roar.
  • After: the same roar, her sac and pods glowing violet with veins, the nest in tiersAfter: the same roar.
  • Before: the nest seen from the pad in Slag Pockets, the Matriarch a dark shape with pink spotsBefore: the nest from the pad.
  • After: the nest from the pad, the Matriarch's crown and pods glowing over the rimAfter: the crown and pods read across the slag.

The guns too

The pass covered the defences as well. The gatling gun is painted from its forge concept now: a tall furnace hopper of molten amalgam with glowing slits, over a ribbed gunmetal jacket. The Citadel's corner turrets are 1.8 times bigger, with lit rings at the muzzle. The amalgam rounds are drawn as a white-hot core in an orange halo, and they throw bigger sparks where they hit. The upgrade chevrons on a turret's base glow in their stats' colours: amber, red, ice and blue.

The gatling gun, before and after

  • Before: the gatling gun as a grey blockout box firing at a ShardlingBefore: the blockout, firing at a swarm.
  • After: the painted gatling gun with its furnace hopper, rounds streaking into a ShardlingAfter: the forge, with its rounds drawn.
  • Before: an upgraded gatling gun with white chevrons on its baseBefore: the upgrade chevrons in plain white.
  • After: the same gun painted, its chevrons glowing amber, red, ice and blueAfter: each stat in its own colour.

What it costs

Glowing, see-through materials cost more to draw. With 18 to 22 bugs in sight, the GPU's median frame went from 10.12 to 10.42 ms, about 0.3 ms more. The whole frame averages 10.52 ms, and its 95th percentile is 11.16 ms, well inside the 16.7 ms a frame at 60 a second allows.

What isn't right yet

The nest's mound stopped drawing when the regions got their walls, so the nest pictures here were taken before that change. The fix is part of the next pass on the regions' outlines. The Citadel's corner turrets are bigger now, but from the usual camera they still read small.