黑料不打烊

For the last century or so, Western aesthetic discourse has dedicated significant energy to form and composition. It’s an unconscious bias embedded into the foundations of our thought since ancient philosophers like Aristotle first distinguished between “substance,” “form,” and “accident” – that is, the matter of which an object is composed, the rational construction and order that makes it what it is, and the secondary attributes it expresses that are neither integral nor exclusive to it. An apple is an apple whether it is red or green, but if it has a thick skin, contains eight pulpy sections, and tastes suspiciously acidic, you might have an orange on your hands.

So much of Western thought focuses on discovering what is essential to being. We tend to think about the world like an amateur archaeology site, where every extraneous bit of rock and stone we remove gets us closer to the good part: the fossils. Neoclassical French painter Jacques-Louis David famously considered color an afterthought in his paintings. Modern architecture eschews all decoration and ornamentation in favor of expressing the simple, formal idea of a building. Even the arts we consider the highest, from music to sculpture to poetry to paintings, all tend to prize the conceptual and essential over the “accidents” of existence – like, for example, color and texture.

I would hardly be the first to point out that we live in an increasingly monotonous, neutral, concrete-and-steel world. Walk down the street of any modern city, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a structure with more ornamentation than the shop signs above the doors, a few graffiti tags, or if you’re lucky, a commissioned mural on the alley wall. Our cities have become realms of almost pure function.

Chris Hodgson, Replication 18, 2022

But as our surroundings have become more homogenous, I believe we have become more aware of the critical role that the so-called “accidents” of philosophy play in our day-to-day lives. Rich colors, varied textures, complex patterns, and even surprising defects and inconsistencies can all play a vital role in helping us orient ourselves in and evaluate our environments. Soft velvet and smooth gold promise luxury; papery tree bark and rippling water suggest serenity; craggy cobblestones and red bricks gesture to the not-so-distant past. Very often, it is these secondary characteristics of our materials world that “flesh out” its existence. Without “accident,” as much as without form or substance, reality would be incomprehensible.

Chris Hodgson, Cobblestone Wall, 2021

All this is to say, in recent decades, we have had to start engaging with our philosophical tradition in reverse. As we continue to approach the fundamentals of materiality in the quantum realm, we also find ourselves revisiting the old, discarded phenomena that ground us in our world. What would it look like to create order – true experience and meaning – out of concepts?

The great metaphysical answer to that question might remain always beyond our grasp. On computers, however, artists and designers of all kinds face a very similar existential question. Unlike a traditional painter or sculptor or architect or photographer, who derives her art from existing media that ultimately transcend her, nothing can be taken for granted in digital art. To create an immersive experience, artists must create every element of reality from scratch, from the red of the roses to the most basic assumptions of Newtonian physics.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and the massive new world of the video game industry has spawned what might be an entirely new kind of artist – one who focuses entirely on the parts of reality the rest of us take for granted. Among these are material artists, who create the unique textures that cover the surfaces in the video game’s environment.

Chris Hodgson, Victorian Floor Tiles - Moonlight Render, 2025

is one such person, currently working as Senior Material Artist at , a video game company headquartered in Finland. Initially interested in graphic design, he transitioned into photorealistic computer modeling and texturing, completed a degree in computer animation, and began working as a general Environment Artist for games before specializing in materials. He has created all kinds of materials, from “the clean bricks, concrete, and steel of a modern building” to “the uneven mud-soaked cobbles of a Victorian back street and everything man-made and natural in between.” Though he acknowledges that there is a tactile element of traditional art that the digital space is currently unable to replicate, he loves “trying to replicate the real world in [his] art” and finds it “very rewarding to recognize the mechanics and patterns present in nature and the world around us.”

Chris Hodgson, Substance Art - Knot, 2023

There is no traditional corollary to the work of a material artist; it is a role that could only exist in the digital space. The sculptor takes the marble’s texture and veins for granted. But in the digital space, the only way for other designers to access diverse textures is through artists like Hodgson. He uses various 3D and 2D editing software to create materials, including industry standards like Substance 3D Designer and Substance 3D Painter, as well as Zbrush, Blender, Affinity Photo, and Affinity Designer. “My art process,” he says,

is to first gather lots of real-world references for the type of material I am going to create… I then “break down” this reference into a long task list of surface details and attributes that I aim to replicate. Details such as the frequency of chipped edges in a brick wall, the density of grain in a wooden floor or the precise pattern of weave in a thick curtain…

 I start with the broad strokes, large shapes and patterns, and the general forms of the materials, like the size and ratio of bricks in a wall or the number of tiles on a roof.

Eventually, as all these large details come together, I begin to think more about aging or degrading the initially pristine material to have more environmental storytelling: dirt splashes from passing vehicles perhaps or dust settling on the tops of surfaces. The more subtle details I add, the closer my materials come to hitting that level of realism I am after; I just have to decide when I am getting diminishing returns and stop.

Hodgson finds inspiration primarily from photography, which depicts details of color and texture that can be easy to miss. He especially loves working with “” and mimicking “the subtle complexity of .”

Chris Hodgson, Ornate Sandstone - Sun Render, 2024

While Hodgson enjoys working on his professional projects, many of which revolve around “contemporary spaces with a post-apocalyptic twist,” he is also expanding his repertoire to include more unconventional, sci-fi-inspired environments and materials, taking influence from “microbiology for the shape language and forms.” Because the digital world is, in a material sense, so far removed from our own, he measures the success of his projects by their hyperrealism, “imitationalism”, and formalism – in other words, by their ability to convince players that the materials are authentic.

Chris Hodgson, Substance Art - Landscape, 2022

The goal of replicating reality in the digital space is a little ironic, considering how much of the contemporary art space is focused on nearly the exact opposite. But what Hodgson loves most about his art is that, when all is said and done, it is actually more of a palette: “an extensive library of building blocks that other artists will take and use.” Though his most stable income, like many in his industry, comes from in-house work (including, in his case, a job at the industry-leading company in Santa Monica, where he worked on the highly respected games, Parts I and II), where he worked with a team of artists to develop a specific video game world, he also enjoys selling materials to game designers on various online platforms, including , which has become an industry hub.

Very little of Hodgson’s work has to do with what we would deem the most “essential” aspects of reality, but paradoxically, it is the work of artists like him that makes computer-generated worlds feel real. “With the long development times and secrecy in the modern games industry, you will likely only really get to see what the public thinks of your art every three years,” he admits. “When your game releases and… your industry peers have incredibly positive words about what you have created, it can be just the motivation you need to keep going… Releasing my portfolio of work for The Last of Us: Part II and seeing both the public and industry reception was such a vindicating experience for me as an artist; I’ll never forget it.” If the goal of a video game is to create as immersive a player environment as possible, then that goal is achieved as much through the small, “accidental” details as through sweeping, conceptual worldbuilding.

Chris Hodgson, Substance Art - Wave, 2022

It takes skill and passion to spend so many hours examining and replicating the finest details of a single surface, the likes of which most of us would pass by without a second thought. All the more so when you consider that, in the end, those many hours are just one link in a giant chain of artists and designers who develop the characters, props, and worlds that make up even a single game – and what’s more, that all that time spent goes against the grain of thousands of years of philosophical inquiry about what is most important about existence. But as our culture veers further and further from the tangible world, both online and in our personal and aesthetic values, it is comforting to see that the human desire to be grounded in the material remains in even the most conceptual spaces.

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