I got a question for game developers
polycounter lvl 9
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?
Replies
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..."