Heyo, it's Matt!

The character, the plants, the buildings...all the things you see in the game didn't just come out of nowhere! So how do they get made? They go through the art production pipeline, with different people on the team involved at every stage.

Here's the breakdown:

Concept Art: Serena starts off by drawing concept art to explore different ideas and hone in on the final design.

Modelling and Unwrapping: Once Serena's happy with the design, I use it to create a 3D model. I also unwrap the model to get it ready for the next stage.

Texturing: Bren or Niamh take the blank 3D model and texture it, adding all the colours and patterns.

Let's see that pipeline in action!

We'll look at the house the main character lives in as an example.

(To be honest, the first step is really Serena coming up with the idea of it in her head but I'm unsure of how to capture that in a picture so we'll just have to skip that part for now.)

Phase 1: Concept Art

So here's Serena's concept art. I'll only be focusing on the house. 

Phase 2: Modelling & Unwrapping

First, I make the rough shape of it:

Now that I have the general shape done, I can add details to it until I am satisfied with the result.

And when the model is completed, I unwrap it so that Bren or Niamh can apply textures. (Unwrapping is when a 3D object is projected onto a flat plane so that textures can be applied to it.)

Phase 3: Texturing

Unwrapping can be a really tedious process. But now that it's done, the model's ready for the next phase and I can send it off to be textured! This time, Bren's the one who turned the blank model above into this:

We take one last look at it as a team and, if we're happy with how it looks, we can finally import this model into the game!

This process can take a very long time to complete. This house took 8 days to make it through the pipeline! (Personally, I tend to completely restart my models a lot of the time because I am unhappy with how they look.)

Want to find out more about code and design? Check out our last post here.
Or see how we're getting ready for our first playtest in next week's post!