Overview
Being a 3D game development company, building game assets play an important role in the development cycle. There are many ways to create 3D game assets. It totally depends on the team you are working with, sometimes one way is better than others. I will try to cover the most efficient way to create the assets.
If you have no or very little experience creating/modeling 3D assets then you will gain a deep understanding of asset creation. For experienced artists, it will help to brush up their skills and eliminate any flaws in the workflow.
The game assets are nothing but objects we see in the game. For example, in shooter game characters, weapons, bullets, trees, buildings in the background can be considered as assets.
Procedure
As I outlined, the topics are in 6 easy steps. Now it’s time to dive deep into it.
When it comes to building game assets, the idea of what we are building is very essential. We can’t just shoot arrows in the dark as it will consume more time to build than what we might have anticipated.
Idea & Concept
Let’s take an example of a first-person shooter game, in this genre character environment and the weapons are 3 main assets that we will require from those 3 main asset types we will choose weapons for simplicity.
When we are making a weapon the idea of what my weapon will look like or the broad idea of what kind of weapon we will make is essential. We need to decide whether my gun will be realistic or stylized, without the general idea behind the asset we can not proceed further.
When the idea is clear we will start working on the concept of the weapon which roughly translates to how our weapon is going to look like we don’t need to dive deep into the mechanics and functionalities yet in the concept stage. Here we are making an MK2 grenade.
Blockout & Sculpting
When our concept is ready, now it’s time to start modeling. 3D Modeling is nothing but shaping our model according to the concept of the grenade. Modeling is one of the most crucial stages of asset development. I start by taking my rough blockout with fewer pieces, minimum geometry, and good edge flow.
After modeling, it’s time to jump into the sculpting of the creation where we need to create the high poly mesh, we have to make geometry sculptable. With some brushes, we have to start detailing our high poly mesh and ready for the final look.
High & Low poly mesh
After finalizing sculpting, here we have high poly mesh. Now it’s time to optimize our high poly mesh for game-ready. Here we have to start retopology of our high poly mesh to low poly. The newly made mesh will function as low poly and original sculpt.
UV unwrapping
As of now, we have completed more than half of the steps now we need to create a UV map of the low poly model. Our unwrapping workflow is to fix that by making the process very quick and getting better results which either increases performance or improves texture resolution.
Baking & Texturing
So far, we have completed most of the development stages and we have arrived at the final stage of the asset creation which is baking and texturing. Baking is the common term used by the designer and model artist which refers to baking the details from highpoly to lowpoly model.
Now, it’s time to turn our model into a realistic or as detailed as possible, this is when texturing comes into the picture. After modeling, sculpting, retopology, and UV wrapping, it’s time for texturing as a PBR approach.
Render & Presentation
The last step for presentation, Lighting and Rendering are where we actually make our asset look awesome. It is very much about bringing the best out of our model. Here we took special care to make our roughness really shine with the position of our lights, and led the eye with light falloffs. I also like to bring my render into photoshop, to have better control over lighting, colors, and post-processing.
So that’s how the typical workflow of 3D game asset development looks like. Again it may vary and depends on the size of the project.
So, that’s the Final view of the MK2 grenade.
Conclusion
I hope what We’ve shared is useful to some of you, and I’m genuinely grateful to everyone reading through it.
Thank you!
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