I got a question for game developers

BI0H0G

So I'm working on project with a buddy and he is doing the coding and I'm doing the art and I got a question. Right now I'm working on a 3d model for the project and did a basic Whitebox of the mesh and now I'm doing the high poly but should I stop and work on the other meshes Whitebox first before I start making high poly of them?

Alex_J

I'd recommend not divulging too much time into any single asset before you get all the pieces working together in engine.

For instance, get all the enviro, fx, animation, characters, and whatever other art assets for one level to passable quality and make sure it all works before you go into polishing of any specific asset.

Reason is because you may discover that you need to change one thing, which necessitates change on other things. So you wanna be pretty certain about what the final product is going to look like before getting into any polish. Then you also will know how to design your workflows with maximum efficiency too.

Then, just banging out the content is no-brainer. Just set up your assembly line and do the work, as all the figuring is already taken care of.

Also, make sure you are trying to devise a workflow that allows maximum adaptability and iteration. Anything you spend time making should be able to be reused or repurposed. This is just a matter of organization, but mostly discipline. Takes more time to work like this, but if you do it right you'll be able to accomplish a lot in a short period of time because you'll have flexibility to solve problems and will never get "stuck".

radiancef0rge

greybox everything. 

Mark Dygert

Do the minimum required to vet your pipeline. So do ugly, cheap, throw away art that just moves you through the steps, all of the steps. The more detail you add the harder it becomes to change things later so keep them easy to edit and fluid. Pretty comes later.

If you're doing a high poly to low poly workflow, bang out some ugly assets that are as close to final art as you can get them without spending any time on them. You want to avoid going too low-tech like using cubes as stand-ins for characters because that will leave large sections of your pipeline un-vetted.

Quickly block in your characters and try to get the proportions mostly correct but don't spend time on details. Vomit some quick and dirty noisey sculpt details and test your baking pipeline.

Then rig and dirty skin it so you can test the export process and get a good sense of how that will flow. That includes dealing with materials and shaders. How are you going to pack textures and set up your shaders?

Do your characters need to be modular? What are the pieces
Only 2 upper/lower body?
4 Chest and arms, legs, hands, feet and head?
14 chest, left arm, right arm, left shoulder, right shoulder, left knee, right knee, left hand, right hand, legs, left foot, right foot, neck and head? 

Will the skeleton help drive visual variety? Such as using scaling of joints to customize characters so not everyone is the same height and proportions? What are the ranges and how does it effect does the game? Do tall players fit in buildings and doorways? Do short players climb ladders and steps correctly? Do you need custom animations?

If you have a significant amount of NPCs, figure out how many you can have on the screen at one time while the assets are still fluid. That doesn't mean how many box-stand-ins can swarm around the player, but actual skinned models with poly counts and shaders that are just as heavy as the final asset, they just don't have any of the laborious details.

How can the process be organized and automated? 

The last thing you want to do is eat  up a bunch of time working on fantastic looking content and then have no idea how will work in game. Answer those questions as best as you can with throw away work and then you can make great looking content. 
"Well we can't have trees or NPCs in the game because our artist used the entire technical budget and all of their time on one character..."
"Also we can't ever customize the characters gear because our artist didn't build it in a modular way..."

GlowingPotato

radiancef0rge said:

greybox everything. 

This.

BI0H0G

Thanks for all of the reply's, This will help me a lot