Competencies In Art Creation for Games

As I wrap up my Art Creation for Games class at Full Sail, I realize how much of a help it was to me. It provided a more in depth look at how the pipeline works in making video games and how I fit into that pipeline.

As an Environment/Prop Artist you'll need experience in how to create a blockout, high res and game res of an asset/model. Here are some screenshots of a barrel I modeled today in the three examples.

Once the asset has been fully modeled and the Game Res has been UV'd, you'll want to use transfer maps to bake the normals and ambient occlusion of the high res onto the game res.

Now at this point you can choose to texture within Maya, Substance Painter or Photoshop but I have chosen to do so in Substance Painter. Use your knowledge of the program you choose to create realistic textures and apply them to the model. In Substance Painter I use the materials and smart materials to create an asset that can be used within a game engine.

I am importing my barrel asset into UE4 (Unreal Engine v04) and attaching the textures I made in Substance to the model. It's as easy as connecting the correct texture to the right plug in. Your metallic texture gets plugged into the metallic, normals into normals.

Now that you have the asset in a game engine and the textures applied to a material you will need to apply that material to the asset. In UE4 all you'll need to do it click the material and drag it onto the asset within the 3D viewer. It's wonderful how easy UE4 is, dragging and dropping is all you'll need to do for anything within the engine. Now from here you can either take a screenshot (on a Mac it's cmnd+shft+3 for full screen and cmnd+shft+4 to do a freehand screenshot), or you can use UE4 high render screenshot option. 

You'll need to click the option box shown here to pull up the menu.

Here is the menu dropdown, shown after I clicked the aforementioned arrow. Go ahead and click on 'High Resolution Screenshot' button.

This option window will pop up. You can choose any option under screenshot size multiplier, but I wouldn't recommend anything over 3, and here you'll see that I chose 2. Once you decided on your options just click the button shown to take the screenshot. A little popup will show up, and to view the screenshots within their folder just click the popup. Here are some high resolution renders on the barrel asset.