There are few platforms that push optimization requirements like Virtual Reality does, no less VR for a mobile headset like the Quest. However, that's exactly what I tackled for my senior project at SCAD - and to make it happen, I developed an asset pipeline to make the best use of time, our performance budget, and the skills of our artists and team members.
While texture atlassing and trim sheets can often do the trick, they also require much more upfront planning to pull off well. With a deliverable project in 10 weeks, we needed something faster. While using flat colors like rec room or job simulator was an option, we felt the flatness wasn't incredibly appealing for the art style we were aiming to achieve.
Instead, I found the perfect middle ground to be a strategy used in Sky: Children of light. Gradient trim sheets! Using UVs to stretch along this trim sheet, you get the ability to "color pick" across the gradients, which turned out to be incredibly fast to iterate on, and quite powerful.
In my mockups testing the workflow, I discovered we could get even more versatility by blurring the gradient strips to get extra color transitions between colors. As I finalized the best resolution and format, I created a modular illustrator file with premade strips in place, so we could easily adjust and tweak these colors even after UV-texturing our assets - this ended up providing a bonus secret ability to recolor old assets to a brand new color palette just by switching out the texture! It also helped unify each level, as we were able to solidify our entire color palette - this limitation ended up creating very visually appealing results!
Comments