Asset creation and store bought assets

 

For this game I'm doing a mix of self-made assets and store bought assets to help fill out the gaps and put the game on the best possible foot for outside showing. 

For store bought assets I'm looking at the Unreal engine Marketplace and will compile a list of store assets that have been used in a future blog post. My aim with the store bought is to go back in over Christmas and refine and unify them so they get some tweaks based on my project needs and create a cohesive art style. The reason for the store bought assets is simply put I don't have the time to make everything and I want a complete and immersive VR world and that means detail, high resolution textures and I want to focus my time on creating the user experience and not just the art work. 

I've already had to manually re-size the textures on several bought assets due to having modular pieces that have all been in 4k which ground the performance of the project to a halt.

For asset creation I'm using a mix of Maya 2019 and Substance painter, both of these are powerful and adaptable tools that I've worked with in the past to achieve some fantastic results, as seen above with the elevator. I wanted to capture a dark and seedy atmosphere that immediately jumps you into the game and also allows me to do some behind the scenes loading in the engine so that the game doesn't seize up and lag which VR is incredibly sensitive to due to the increased rendering requirements. 

I created the room the 2nd level, takes place in, this was done using both Maya and substance, but the props inside the level for example are store assets. The gun was also a store bought asset that I needed to manually animate inside of Maya 2020 which was fairly simple to then bring back to the engine. This was a good time saver as I did not need to create and then rig the model I only needed to export it from Unreal Engine, animate the weapon and then import the animation using the existing mesh skeleton inside of Unreal. 

The completed room populated with props

I have also re-textured several assets to make them more unique to the game for example the desk seen below.

The original asset desk from the unreal engine marketplace

The desk looked too dirty to fit the overall style of the room so I decided to bring it into substance painter to give it a new texture, and keep the texture size to a reasonable limit- allowing me a greater deal of control over performance that will add up the more assets I work on. 

I decided to make the desk more ornate in this example, adding a pattern, a new wood texture and a little message for the player to find, it is a detail that in most games would be obscured, but taking advantage of VR I can add little details like this to enhance the level of detail and make it worthwhile for the player to explore the environment.

The use of the assets allow me to focus on the areas of the game that I feel are important, such as the player avatar code.

However there is a balance, with using assets from a wide range of sources there's a risk that they won't all fit together in a way that benefits the project and instead will leave the project looking odd- or as mentioned above- need additional work before they are suitable for the purpose I'm putting them to. I feel that even if I need to fix some assets and make changes to the texture or sometimes the model itself- it is still faster than trying to make everything myself.