Speed up your game ass et creation
Machinegames’ Matthias Develtere reveals the pro workflow to create environment assets for video games
Matthias Develtere Matthias is a junior 3D artist at Machinegames, who’s worked on the Wolfenstein series. He likes to work on environment assets and vehicle models. develterematthias. wordpress.com
Artists who have made a video game environment before will know how much time it takes to make everything from scratch – from high-poly to low-poly versions for every model, to unique textures for all of them. The result is you end up doing the same props over and over again. For next-gen games, knowing how much further you can push the amount of detail could really be a nightmare. So let’s come up with some unique and fresh ideas of how to speed up your pipeline.
The aim of this tutorial is to give you some tips on how to make detailed environments without having to go through the same lengthy and expensive pipeline for every asset. Still, if you want to make high-poly models then you’re in luck, because we are going to cover how to best use the Smooth Edge Shading tool. This is a really useful tool because it allows you to kitbash your model in a really short amount of time.
As well as this, I will share my process for using the Hotspot Texturing tool in Modo and how to combine this with tileable texture patterns for effective and quick prop creation.
Throughout this tutorial I will continue to come back to the same fundamental idea: how to save time and end up with a consistent design/environment for a video game.
To follow along with this tutorial you can either use Modo or 3ds Max; I suggest Modo because I believe its pipeline is easier. You can download the script and plugins for both software, as well as my work file for this fan art take on a level from Splinter Cell, to explore the scene and polycount. Plus, take a tour of the environment at www.skfb.ly/jsr7 to get a good idea of how I work. For all the assets you need go to creativebloq.com/vault/3dw206