The Importance of Asset Design

At first, populating your games world can feel like a very foreboding task. Devising a simple, rigorous plan can guide subsequent decisions by all members of the creative team.

It all starts with a detailed list outlining every asset from trees that shelter you to the rocks you walk on. From here, priorities can be set, and tasks divided up and assigned. Now that everyone knows what to do, it's time to decide how they are going to do it. Developing your game’s "style" is essential to achieve cohesion among your team's artists. These rules are developed through a mixture of traditional research and art tests. From this practice, design choices can be made, such as if we wanted our game to have a low poly or a high poly aesthetic and what that would mean for our artist's workflow. For our game, we decided to push for a lower poly visual style. Rules can now be established: all cylindrical shapes will have no more than ten sides: organic models such as trees and rocks will be limited to 500 faces making their mesh.

Process of creating organic objects

To help further understand what this all means, let's go through some examples. When dealing with our more architectural models such as our temple and torii gates, maintaining consistency and adherence to our rules is a beneficial side effect of the nature of hard surface modeling. Controlling topology can be a very intuitive process allowing the artist greater control while keeping polycount low. It is the organic models that extend the artist's flow by having them start in ZBrush. It is there that trees and rocks get their shape before being transferred over to Maya for a cleanup. From this point, the model gets recreated through a method known as quad draw so that a new model can be made with the desired polycount. With the model now complete it must be properly setup for use in engine. To do this the models must be properly UV’ed and assigned texture sets, simple one-color textures with names. We do this so that once a model is put in engine newer custom designed textures created by the team’s artist can be easily applied where needed.

Renders of modeled shrine, texture groups and finished asset

To bring this article to a close, I want to reiterate the importance of asset cohesion for a game environment. The task ahead may seem like it is going to be too much to tackle. To take a breath and write it all out for everyone to see. Don't underestimate the importance of research and practice to see what works for you and your team. Finally, develop your style, giving your team a clear direction going forward.

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Author: Dylan Shepherd