Friendly Art - Vertex 2

 

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In this article, Philip Klevestav explains why its essential not only for the artist's to plan out their asset creation but to also collaborate with the level designers to understand the importance of simplifying the modular design kits and keeping the assets friendly further into development. Philip Klevestav is currently employed as an Environment Artist at Blizzard Entertainment.

Standardize

Keeping a consistent measurements throughout the game is essential when designing modular assets and should be the first thing that is decided prior to creating the design kit. Collaboration with the whole team to decide on a standard unit scale and the testing of the design kit will help avoid adjustments to the game system later on in development.

Testing Design Kit

Testing out an asset kit before moving onto creating the final assets is essential. You want to test out as many assets as possible, usually the most common ones and use them in ways that may not be obvious at first. This ensures once they get to the level designers as finished assets, they will work as intended, the level designer already has knowledge of the asset kit and the level building should be both fast and efficient.

Design kits are basically prototype building blocks for your modular kit, not only do they serve you as the base test meshes for the final assets but they can also help you block out your levels / scene's fast or rapid prototyping.




Friendly Design

When creating both the design kit and the finial assets, you will end up with many different assets that can have different center points and possibilities of axis rotation. It's good practice to standardize a pivot point rule or system among the team and stick to it as much as possible, this will make using the assets in the level building stage much easier which will save time which in turn saves money/work.

Each asset can vary in terms of its pivot point, this is mostly determined by what the asset in question will be used for and if there are other assets that need to link up to that pivot point. Most modular pieces will be have there pivot point on a set unit position to snap to grid but some off grid assets may have it central to mesh.

Summary

This article was fairly interesting and informative and gave me a good idea of how I can improve on making my assets much easier to use, not only for myself but for anyone that may use them in the future.

He focused quite heavily on the idea that with proper planning, communication of the team and testing of the kit itself is not only recommended but totally essential in the design phase of the kit.

Further in the article he describes his experience with how player collision can affect your design choices with assets and when texturing assets that it needs to be readable and not over used or complicated to the players. I'll probably go back on this last section once I've done some more research and got some prototype assets created for testing.

Reference

• Philip Klevestav. (2014). Friendly Art. Vertex. 2 (1), p24-31.