- Art Pipeline -
Goals and Questions
Goals and Questions
1
Smooth Performance on PC with Open World Gameplay
How do we ensure that despite having so many assets visible on-screen (flying open world game) that our performance is still smooth on an average computer? What can we do from the start to prevent performance bottlenecks?
2
Speedy Production Time & Minimal Wasted Work
What can we streamline? What does our style require us to do over and over again? Where do we do checks and iteration to ensure that nothing far down the pipeline will be unusable or wasted?
3
Consistent Quality Despite Being a Student Team
This game was created with a student team, some who had little experience with UV unwrapping or using the more advanced tools in Substance Painter. How do we ensure that all of our assets not only look good, but also look of similar quality across all of our assets?
Our Game Style
PlushieBlaze takes place in an entirely fabric/plushie world. Some additional considerations for our pipeline includes textile density, noisy fabric appearances when objects are faraway, and the size of stitching. I mainly focused on the rule of our art style for our team and way to streamline asset creation to ensure they all looked cohesive together in the world.
I'm always learning and trying to improve, so I'll have a post mortem and things I would improve for next time at the end!
- ART PIPELINE SLIDESHOW -
Table of Contents
Download the Full Slide Deck:
ART POSTMORTEM
What Went Well
Consistency Across the Team
With this workflow all of our assets had a cohesive look and feel. I never assigned an asset and had it come back to me looking/feeling as if it wouldn't fit well in our game, which on students teams, can be a common problem.
Quick and Easy for Artists
The pipeline was also a hit for the art team, especially the 3D modelers. They loved the fact that there were clear guidelines and a consistent workflow that once they learned how to do was easy to repeat for asset.
Hitting Our Performance Goals
The most rewarding moment of development for me was when we made a Switch build and despite all of our props and decorations, we were at a solid 60 fps! It was a great moment for the team as it really felt like everyone's hard work had paid off!
What I Would Improve
Props that Fit Together but that Don't Create a Vision
Our game certainly has a cohesive style, but I found when putting it all together, that there is a lot of color and that we didn't design themes with the purpose of guiding the player. Making a scene very monotone where highlighted areas tell them where to go. This is because of two reasons. One is that we only ever concepted props and not entire scenes for a unified vision. So props re very repeatable, but a certain area didn't have a particular identity concepted. The second is that with the pipeline, there is some wiggle room, but not a ton for coor variations, maybe we could have made a separate material for each scene or added more color variations to the atlas, but I'm not sure if that would have ended up causing more issues in the long run with keeping cohesion. I think concepting a "vision" first and then pulling props from that and maybe drawing them separately when needed could have worked a bit better in the regard for a level's "feel".
Could Have Leaned Even More into the Style
I think we have a nice stylized look, but I think where art styles shine is that they are unique enough to be memorable to a user. When a game sticks in a player's mind they are more likely to talk about it and of course buy it as well. I think we are a little better than fully generic, but I think we could have leaned harder into more wacky shapes and odd bits and bobs to make the world more cartoony. I think kicking off the project with a bit more exploration into more extreme visual styles would have maybe better informed the team what look to do.
Maybe More Research in Terms of Mesh Cost versus Material Cost
One downside of the art pipeline as it currently is, is that for simple color variations of the same prop, I need to either apply a separate solid color material, or we have to make a separate asset with altered UVs. I ended up doing the solid colro approach as I wanted to keep our unique mesh count as low as possible, and we had room for more materials, but I think I would love to spend some time thinking up ways to do color variations without changing the UVs or applying a completely different material.
Final Thoughts
I think overall the style choice and art pipeline I created worked well for the team!
Out of all the other teams in the class as a whole, Gibba's art team was able to be the most consistent and efficient in terms of output and quality.
We made an incredible amount of props and assets that look fantastic with only one concept artist and two 3D modelers, all of who worked on average 10-12 hours a week on the game. It was a really great moment in development to run at 60 fps on the Switch right off the bat and not have to worry about pivoting to optimize anything art related halfway through development. I'm incredibly proud of the work the art team delivered and how their art shined in our game!
