The Pipeline of Creating an Asset

During the beginning of the project we had a lot of confusion on the pipeline of creating an asset, it was clear that we needed better pre-production and planning of how we were to do this; we decided to create a trello board which we could compile our assets into. This board was split up into sections which can be seen below:

This allowed us to clearly keep track of our progress in asset production, and meant that we could prioritise certain models - such as trees and large assets. An issue that we had during this stage was that we had no whitebox to work with, this resulted in the majority of the group being confused on where assets would go in the scene - therefore, it was harder to know which ones to prioritise. This also led to us being confused on what the scale of each asset would be, how detailed to make the texture, and how much time to spend on each one. Looking back, our biggest mistake was not creating a whitebox as this would have helped with production and gave us a clearer understanding of our pipeline.

How we worked as a team:

The process of creating an asset began with Harrison and I creating the concept art for it, we would sketch out roughly how the asset should look and the kind of style that it should follow, we also added colour and detail to these for the texturing in the future. These concepts would then be passed on to James and Owen who would model each asset to be low-poly and stylised; the unwrapping stage at first was done by James and Owen, however we found it was easier for Harrison and I to complete this part as we had an understanding of where we needed to place seams for the texturing. Once the unwrapping was done, we would take the models into Substance Painter and texture them. Once this was done all four of us would have the responsibility of importing the models into the engine.

We worked out a method to organise our folders as to prevent us from losing any files or mixing them up, we predominantly used google drive for this and followed a naming convention which James had suggested:

Overall once we got into the flow of the game project, we were producing assets and importing them into engine quickly, there are still many aspects which we could have improved on, however we were soon making good progress with our game.