The most difficult part was in the middle of the production, when you start having lots and lots of assets. It’s a good challenge to macro manage hundreds of files, FBX, instances, heavy hi polys, textures… Is this asset named correctly? UV, Vertex maps, polycount, modularity, snapping… Is everything ready to be imported in the game engine? We were lucky enough to be organized since the beginning so it was just a small headache sometimes.

Textures

Textures are an important aspect of making game art. Establishing some guidelines and directions at the beginning of every project can save you a lot of time in the process. We knew that we wanted to do a project that encompasses all the characteristics of realism without being strictly realistic. When you do so, you should make a lot of concepts, iterations, until you come up with something you’re satisfied.

The first step is a crucial one and every artist will tell you the same thing, gather references. When creating textures, you have to gather information about the texture itself (like gathering a lot of pictures of different bricks) but a lot of people forget that these textures will be in relation with each other, so you have to collect references of the general environment you will create as well.

Determining a colour palette early in your process can save you a lot of time. If you don’t pay attention to this detail, it will impact your general composition at the end. And it can save you time near the end of a project by having the right combination of colours, saturation, etc.

After this, you want to determine the amount of control you will give to the artists (which parameters will you expose) and the general aspect of each texture. Will it be worn? Old? New? For example, Venice is built on an island and one of the first things you can see is the amount of moss everything has. So it was clear that the control of moss, and the texture of moss itself had to be be taken seriously, because it is one of the textures that would be everywhere. Exposing some parameters when you create textures with Substance designer is really important, more so when you’re working with other artists. The amount of control is essential and you don’t want your team coming at you every time to change little things that they can eventually do. For example, every normal, roughness, cracks, etc. were therefore exposed so artists can achieve the vision they have in their head for each asset.