General Production Process

I believe the most important and crucial part of the entire art production is the blockout. By defining out as much as you can in a very early stage of the production you can save yourself and other involved developers a lot of time.

Lets say you „blocked out“ your level with literally just boxes and other primitive shapes. Everything is grey and doesn’t really tell you much about what the environment you are building is supposed to be at all. That’s why I personally like to create geometry that somewhat resembles the silhouette of the final object as well as adding placeholder textures. That allows me to quickly build an abstract version of all the objects I need for the entire scene in a very short amount of time while enabling me to color tweak those placeholder textures in the very first iterations already. This way I can nail down the „big picture“ very early, see which and how many assets I really need and even try out some lighting. This approach allows quick iterations while giving an Impression of the final Image in an early stage of the production.

I do this for all kinds of assets; here are examples for solid objects and vegetation. Example for vegetation: Placeholder to final