iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

New portfolio entry that I somehow forgot to upload. Roots was a print magazine I was co-creator on. It was unfortunately very short-lived, but I had really great fun making it. portfolio.ghost-ufo.com/roots/

portfolio.ghost-ufo.com

Thomas Söderlund Portfolio — Roots

The portfolio of Thomas Söderlund

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Here are a couple of refs I used before the change. We had junk in the foreground like in the Cowboy Bebop shots to give a better sense of enclosed spaces. In the end the camera we went with was the best choice for the game, and that's the most important thing. It was just such a headache :)

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

We were a small team, so I was wary about the scope growing too much with such a dynamic camera. A free camera is nice, but it dictates how the environments are laid out, especially interiors. The camera needs a lot of space to swing around.

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Yeah, it was a co-op multiplayer game from the start. About the 3rd person, I both agree and disagree on all your points :)

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Oh no worries, I think the tech side is kind of boring anyhow :) Tech is just a tool, the important and fun thing is the creative result. I could talk for hours about economical animation, cel shadows, Taiyo color palettes, gate weave, in-camera optical effects, background art techniques, etc!

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

There was no alternative plan. But we had good results fairly quickly, so we were never worried. Game camera changed halfway through pre-prod, though. Went from topdown'ish single camera to third person splitscreen! The look and direction we ended up with was the goal from the beginning.

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Most of it happened during pre-prod, but artist tools kept improving during prod. I think me and Tony spent about a year researching and prototyping. A lot of time went into making it work nicely with the dynamic game camera, as almost all surfaces and objects needed to look good at every distance.

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

The article is nice, but a little brief, imho! It touches a bit on how the cel line rendering is done, but not that it was based on how the carbon on the acetate sheets actually looked when drawings were xerox-transfered to be painted :) I should probably do a bunch of deep-dive posts at some point.

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Thank you! Unfortunately the handheld can't be bought. Yet. It might still happen in some form, since it was more or less finished. I just kind of stumbled when it came to building the actual game, haha.

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Thank you! I'm kind of amazed at how well it came together. NPR in Unreal was a challenge, but just a technical one. The main fun/effort came from really figuring out the actual style through sooo much research, what makes it tick, and creating a fast and fun pipeline for our artists.

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Thank you! It absolutely was, and it took me to a whole new level of appreciation understanding of the art.

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Orbitals is out! I'm so incredibly proud of how it looks. I was the Technical Art Director on it, and made the cel and "painted" backgrounds shaders, as well as the full graphics pipeline and tooling. (invaluable art guidance provided by @tonyholmsten.bsky.social) www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAaJ...

youtube.com

Orbitals – Launch Trailer – Nintendo Switch 2

YouTube video by Nintendo of America

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

New portfolio online! portfolio.ghost-ufo.com

A screen capture of the landing page of portfolio.ghost-ufo.com

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Ouf, yeah. I have experienced that, too. It throws a wrench into everything. I feel it's quite common to mistake colour correction for some sort of final gloss that you apply to make things "more pretty," instead of fixing issues.

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Amazing film, wasn't expecting it to be so grim.

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

And to clarify further; for me it wasn't so important to go down a nostalgic rabbit hole and be period-correct and dull about it, trying to emulate some sort of extinct banana flavour, but rather do something unexpected stylistically in Unreal Engine, which is provokingly tuned for bland realism.

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

And your observations are relevant. The overly nostalgic/hyperreal 80's presentation of the game is not what I personally would have gone for, but it probably helps sell units...

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Oh no worries, that's the gist I got from it, too. I feel the same way, with ever-shorter cycles of nostalgia and AI-induced aesthetics fatigue which makes everything worse.

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

No Lumen or GI, no Nanite, etc. But we used distance fields for some ambient occlusion-style effects.

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Yeah, there are no stock effects. Halation and (proper) grain simulation are doing most of the work. And maybe just a slight hint of vignetting on top. There's also no tonemapping. The entire pipeline is SDR. The colors you pick are the colors you see.

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

No chromatic aberration afaik. I left the project a while ago, so maybe they added it, but I'd be very surprised if there was any. Maybe your colleague is referring to the halation effect you can see in some of the shots?

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Thanks, man! Yeah, it feels really good, and can't wait to get people's eyes on the rest of the game. There's just so many subtle nerdy details in there (like the fact that cels often cast a slight shadow on the background painting, which we recreated) Artbook at some point feels likely :)

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Orbitals' tech art director here :) "80s anime style" fits a lot of different styles, same with the statement "80s comics style". And I wouldn't say we were apeing, it's more of a love letter to an aesthetic so shaped by the constraints of the medium, in particular the backgrounds.

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Thomas Söderlund @gnistregn.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Hey, Orbitals' Tech Art Director here. I did all the anime cel+painted shaders, tech and tools. Nothing baked, nothing painted. Lit in realtime, custom Unreal build for more control. Main pass is only writing to modified gbuffer layout. _Everything_ happens in postprocess stages.

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