3D artists offer an interview with senior environmental artist Koy Vanoteghem about the crowdsourced assets experiment. Displayed in the interview are some of the crowdsubmitted assets.<blockquote>What limitations/rules did the artists have to bear in mind when creating their assets for submission to Wasteland 2?
Very few limitations were laid out for the participants, and quite intentionally so. By providing just a loose thumbnail concept and a few small notes on tri-counts and map sizes our hope was to encourage creativity and imagination in the artists involved. The freedom to work in a way that artists are already comfortable and successful with seemed paramount given our rapid turnaround time and the knowledge that many contributors would be doing this in their precious spare time.
In the end, so much of the style unification in a pipeline comes down to things like lighting, post-processing and material set-up anyway… and that’s true if you’re contracting with specific individuals or a prop house. Obviously, we need the assets to be game ready in that their geometry and materials need to be within reason. But our expectation was that, for 90% of the people getting involved, there was already going to be some understanding of what is typical for our industry. For those unfamiliar we set up the aforementioned WIP forums and there was a good level of encouragement and feedback to get them up to speed. For those that submitted assets that fell outside the norms, we then have an opportunity to go back and forth with them to get their work in the right zone if they’re interested in pursuing that.
Ultimately, we will end up tweaking a prop here and there… a shift in color, a geometry reduction for performance reasons, or rearrangement for variety. We know that upfront, and so we didn’t feel the need to push a specific agenda when it came to prop creation.</blockquote>
Very few limitations were laid out for the participants, and quite intentionally so. By providing just a loose thumbnail concept and a few small notes on tri-counts and map sizes our hope was to encourage creativity and imagination in the artists involved. The freedom to work in a way that artists are already comfortable and successful with seemed paramount given our rapid turnaround time and the knowledge that many contributors would be doing this in their precious spare time.
In the end, so much of the style unification in a pipeline comes down to things like lighting, post-processing and material set-up anyway… and that’s true if you’re contracting with specific individuals or a prop house. Obviously, we need the assets to be game ready in that their geometry and materials need to be within reason. But our expectation was that, for 90% of the people getting involved, there was already going to be some understanding of what is typical for our industry. For those unfamiliar we set up the aforementioned WIP forums and there was a good level of encouragement and feedback to get them up to speed. For those that submitted assets that fell outside the norms, we then have an opportunity to go back and forth with them to get their work in the right zone if they’re interested in pursuing that.
Ultimately, we will end up tweaking a prop here and there… a shift in color, a geometry reduction for performance reasons, or rearrangement for variety. We know that upfront, and so we didn’t feel the need to push a specific agenda when it came to prop creation.</blockquote>