How long does it take to see your work in game?
I am sure it varies wildly from studio to studio and engine to engine. I have worked in places were it's near instant and I have worked in places where it involves a programmer and can take a day or two. Except for Unity these have all been proprietary engines.
I feel like this is something that can make or break the arts. It really bothers me when I can't rapidly iterate and I wanted to ask around to see what your average time is to see your asset in game/engine.
I feel like this is something that can make or break the arts. It really bothers me when I can't rapidly iterate and I wanted to ask around to see what your average time is to see your asset in game/engine.
Replies
If you can't see your stuff ingame from an early stage, you're flying blind.
Its been a bumpy road for me, coming from an Unreal Engine 3 studio where things where fairly quick to at least see from max into the editor - to then going to Trion who used a custom gamebryo pipeline. It was a multi-step nightmare process to see my characters in the game and could take anywhere from a couple of minutes to 15 minutes depending on what was happening at the time and what you were working on - for some things it was the ultimate nightmare of nightmares. We needed multiple programs, specific exporting stuff, local servers and everything needed to be done in a specific order or it simply wouldnt work. - JUST to see a specular value tweak on your metal.
For me that was a rediculous thing to experience just coming from an Unreal Engine 3 project - I was stepping backward into the dark ages.
Prototyp3 here on polycount will recall that upon showing me the 'pipeline' I seriously thought i was being punked, like 'hahaha new guy lets fuck him up' - unfortunately, no.
Thats really how it was done. Epitome of frustration.
Having said that, MightyPea, your totally right man, Unity is a dream. That kind of near instant - auto update functionality should be paramount for all engines and updates to engines going forward.
Now at Mythic working on Warhammer, another gamebryo engine game, artists had almost no ability to import their own meshes - all we had was an art zone with some nifs we would overwrite. The pipeline was export a nif and then someone puts it in game - a lead, producer, magical elves? I had no idea.
HAHA!!!
I should point out that it's unfair of me to say it was gamebryo tbh - Probably more accurate to say it started out as gamebryo - but ended up as something completely unique. Horribly inefficient from purely a 'character art iteration speed' perspective, though.
If I can't see the asset in game this is a pretty good substitute. Ideally you have both tho. What I find happens is that over time changes in the games look doesn't/cant get propagated to the modeling programs. Stuff like color corrections and other post processing.
What would be great for freelancers is if studios provided a material/shader that is close to theirs. I would hope that would cut down on how much internal artists had to edit the assets. Probably would never happen tho. Too much proprietary BS and 9 out of 10 freelancers would never use it anyway.
I currently use unreal. Different strokes etc