Questions about creating game assets

The look I’m going for is photo-real or very close. I’m still deciding on what game engine to use, I’m thinking Godot, or maybe Unreal Engine.

Q 1. I’ve read about putting multiple assets’ textures on one set of maps. I believe this is called an atlas? Is this a useful technique for game assets? Is it better in some way?

Q 2. How obsessive do I have to be with everything being the lowest-poly possible? For example, should a metal balcony railing be a cube with lots of transparency so it looks like it is open, or should it be modeled? Should low-poly ivy be a single plane or is a 50 face group of vines okay?

Thank you for your help!

I think this are the wrong questions at the wrong time. If you wanna be photo-real you have to have mid to high poly and maybe texture atlasses are too limiting… The balcony example is very good: are they unreachable for the player then they could be just planes for a low to midpoly game but not for a photo-real…
Also different engines may have differrent aproaches and/or limitations… You may have to consider should it work on a computer for 900 EUR/$ or need it TWO graphic cards 3000 EUR/$ each … so you may have a look at something like Games from Scratch or do some more research on your own. Consider this: For high poly games millions of polygons and pixels for textures (albedo map, specular map, normal map) have to be handled in contrast to thousends of polygons and one diffuse map (for example).

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Hi there,

@Okidoki summed it up quite good. A few things to consider:

  • what type of game do you want? 2D, 3D? Stylized, realistic, etc… FPS or TPS? (The quality and approach on textures might be very different in that regard, e.g. grometry, texture resolution, etc…)

Let’s say you settle with a realistic approach, something like a Far Cry 5, which is pretty decent in that regard. Even the most realistic games have up close ugly details :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: the looks are quite universal, but the resolution and geometry is not. A gun the FPS character holds might be 60 000 faces while the flower pot you’re aiming at is 30-40, also the textures, 1k vs 2k vs 4k. LOD is also needed to change some of these when you get up close.

  • moving to a game engine let’s say you settle with UE4-5, arguably the best way today for FPS, TPS (also the hardest though).

  • keep in mind, that playing the game will cost the less of energy, while creating the assets a bit more, and working in the engine the most (1000 EUR PC vs 3000 EUR PC :slight_smile: )

  • so, for now, what you need to learn is to create a universal approach for textures (most possibly PBR, since everything procedurally would take about a millennia, and keep a reasonable approach for the resolution and geometry - balcony example).

  • creating realistic assets is much easier low-scale. Even a cheaper 1000 EUR rig can create photorealistic assets, but it is NOT the point. The point is the fake photorealism the best you can. Use bump instead of displacement so you won’t need that many faces for example. Master Principled shaders so you can bake everything properly for one material. Learn how to bake high quality, that you can convert low-res (bake high poly onto low poly), etc, etc… And finally learn how to import into your game engine of choice.

  • the hard part is to find the middle ground between looks and resources, but there is no real list of assets you can follow, e.g. how many faces this or that should be.

If I were you, I would train in all these I mentioned. Create some low poly assets to look at, some high poly tools to use, and some backgrounds or plants with nice alpha cut stuff. Then you create this lil scene and move this and only this into a game engine just to walk around inside UE and then you can measure the uniformity and experience and later you can come back at that to fine tune the models and textures. Once you have that lil scene running you will already know how to create and import assets, and how to make it somewhat playable, even if like a walking simulator. Then, you can start to expand with the same viewpoint.

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@Okidoki @AgentTuron Thank you both for taking the time to answer!

I would want to make the game accessible to the most people, but maybe that is not possible…

I did not know there was such a thing as high-poly games. I thought everything was low-poly with detailed normal maps in order to push out dozens of frames per second?

I want 3D, realistic, not sure if first person or third person yet.

Yes, Far Cry 5 level graphics is about what I’m aiming for. Maybe “photo-real” was the wrong words in my original post; I forgot that everything looks ugly up close.

Sorry, I did not understand. Do you mean low-poly?

Thank you for the tips!

Hi there :slight_smile:

What I meant under low-scale, is not to aim too high for first. Create a few assets, and a scene, not a gigantic map, so you can see your textures and overall looks there.

As mentioned, some textures can actually be pretty ugly up-close, but never really meant to be looked at like that. I usually check the textures and models in games (not in a boss fight lol, but just free roaming). In Far Cry, or AC, they also make mistakes some places.

Seams in a tree bark, or too much light left in a piece of foliage when they scanned the asset. You can often see the mesh as well to be a bit jagged, when low poly. But noone cares right? Because the overall looks really are breathtaking, especially the light, volumetrics, all that.

So, I would say, just experiment a lil bit with a few assets. Create a garden, or something, that has a fence, so you can test architecture, plants, smaller assets, and maybe something in your hands. UE is great because they have a pre-set for FPS and TPS as well, and you can walk around in Play Mode with the EU character. You could also swap the sci-fi gun to your asset, etc…

If you’re alone, it is a huge huge undertaking, but not impossible, if you are dedicated and have time. Okay and maybe also a rig that is around 2000 EUR at least :smiley:

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Thank you for the info!

Consider following some outsourcing companies or artists, sometimes they post parts of their process. Normally a high quality model is created from concepts, them a conversion from quad to tris in a away that can be scalable inside a game engine. Far objects will have low vertices maintaining it’s proportions, gradually adapting it’s quality when getting near it, avoiding FPS drops from excessive amount of vertices in screen. What you are trying to do manually it’s an automatic feature for props.

Nuare Studio: https://www.artstation.com/nuarestudio
Virtuos: https://www.artstation.com/virtuosgames
Lemon Sky Studio: https://www.artstation.com/lemonsky

Quixel has some free scalable high quality assets for environments. You can take a view at their topology. In Unreal you can download all content for free. Game dev it’s not fun at all.

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Thanks for the tips and links! I will do that