Elements of Game Design: Documentation

Documentation is incredibly important to the design and creation process, at my stage documentation helps to solidify the things you learnt over the process. Documenting where you made mistakes and how you fixed these mistakes has a great impact on your learning curve, it also provides a place to turn to when you come up against similar issues at a later date. Essentially documentation allows your process to be explained to someone else so that they could create the same piece.

In a professional environment this documentation is incredibly important as it provides reference to the rest of the team as to how you produced the work and if someone is to pick up half way through a project all of the information they need is within the documentation. Most importantly documentation sets out things like art style, naming conventions and technical limitations it acts as a reference for the artists working on the project.

I am currently creating an environment for the BMW Art Test and so decided to use this project as the basis for this excercise.

Brief:

"To create an environment suitable for advertising a product, it should display your artist judgement and abilities within 3D art and realistic rendering"

Outline:

I will create an environment which can be used both for my art test and for my portfolio, this means that it should be optimised for game standards in terms tri limit and texture space. Even with this limitation I am aiming for a photo realistic representation of a dockyard. I chose a dockyard because of its modularity, I should be able to make a tileset containing a shipping container, shipping pallet, oil drums, water drums, cardboard boxes, warehouse shelving, airconditioning ducts, and then make the main warehouse. I want to focus on quick techniques for producing efficient and realistic assets. The audience for this project is a professional marketing visualisation team the idea being to display my artistic judgement and abilities. For the purposes of this blog post I will pretend that there is to be a Lead character and NPC in this scene.

Reference Material:

Technical Specifications:
I want to hit a specific frame rate and to do this I need to keep a consistent amount of tris and draw calls on the screen. This needs to be closely considered so that the level runs smoothly. Fortunately for me the floor of this environment is going to be amost entirely flat so I can easily reduce my terrain limit and save tris and draw calls in that area. However because of the nature of dockyards there are going to need to be a fair amount of decals to break up the concrete and tarmac.

Software:
- 3Ds Max
- Photoshop
- nDo2
- CryEngine3

Lead Character
- 10,000 Tris
- 2x 1024 Materials
      - 2x Diffuse (1x Specular, 1x Opacity Map in Alpha)
      - 2x Normal (2x Gloss in Alpha)
      - 1x Colour Specular

NPC
- 7,000 Tris
- 1x 1024 Material
- 1x 512 Material
       - 2x Diffuse (1x 512 Opacity Map in Alpha)
       - 2x Normal
       - 2x Specular (2x Gloss in Alpha)

Vehicle (Hero Asset)
- 13,000 Tris
- 2x 1024 Materials (or equivilent memory space)
       - 2x Diffuse (1 x Opacity Map)
       - 2x Normal (2x Gloss in Alpha)
       - 2x Specular (1x Colour Specular)

Warehouse Building
- 5,000 Tris
- 4x 512 Tilable Materials
       - 2x Diffuse
       - 2x Normal
       - 2x Specular (2x Gloss in Alpha)

Oil Drums
- 2,000 Tris
- 1x 1024 Material (4 Variations)
       - 1x Diffuse
       - 1x Normal
       - 1x Specular (Gloss in Alpha)

Water Drums
- 3,000 Tris
- 1x 1024 Material
       - 1x Diffuse
       - 1x Normal
       - 1x Specular (Gloss in Alpha)

Shipping Pallet
- 200 Tris
- 1x 512 Material (3 Variations)
       -1x Diffuse
       -1x Normal (1x Specular in alpha)

Barrier
- 2,000 Tris
- 1x 1024 Material
       - 1x Diffuse (1x Specular in alpha)
       - 1x Normal

Shipping Container LOD 0
- 10,000 Tris
- 1x 1024 Material (5 Variations)
       -1x Diffuse (1x Gloss in alpha)
       -1x Normal (1x Specular in alpha)

Shipping Container LOD 1
- 5,000 Tris
- 1x 1024 Material (5 Variations)
       -1x Diffuse (1x Gloss in alpha)
       -1x Normal (1x Specular in alpha)

Shipping Container LOD 2
- 2,000 Tris
- 1x 512 Material (5 Variations)
       -1x Diffuse
       -1x Normal (1x Specular in alpha)

Reference:
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/OptimizingGraphicsPerformance.html

http://freesdk.crydev.net/display/SDKDOC3/Asset+Performance+Guidelines#AssetPerformanceGuidelines-ImportanceofAssetOptimization