The Crate Series

This series of docs goes over the many ways to make an asset for game development from very optimised and fast like Palette texturing to highly detailed approaches like Digital sculpting.

The Crate Series will be the first series that goes over many of the approaches to create optimized game assets for use in Game engines such as Unity and Unreal.

This series is better suited to beginners as the docs cover all the basics from using Blender for the first time with an asset that is simple and quick to set up.

Asset Creation Approaches

There are many approaches to creating assets for games and each approach has advantages and disadvantages.

Palette and Gradient Texturing

• Beginner Level

• Fast to create

• Highly optimized

• Limited style

Assets use a simple texture with all the colors or gradients you want to use on the asset, and you place the UVs of the asset onto those colors or gradients.

Depending on how you create the material, this can be used on all the assets in the game, greatly improving the performance of the game due to reduced drawcalls (more on those later).

Palette and Gradient texturing are the most optimised approach to creating assets for games. It can also be the fastest to create. This is a great approach for beginners to get a good foundation of low polygon modelling with reasonable results.

The main issue with this is the limitation to style. Generally, Palette and Gradient texturing produces quite simple assets, but that can be a great design in itself. With most platforms/devices being able to render higher polycounts, you can push the polycount further due to the optimised use of materials for more unique designs.

Tileable Textures

• Beginner Level

• Fast to medium speed

• Limited to larger assets (ground, walls, rockfaces etc)

A Tileable Texture is a texture that can repeat without issue indefinitely in both horizontal and vertical axes. Tileable textures use one material for large areas of polygons such as floors/ground, walls, ceiling or roofs. Common examples include brick, wood / wood slats, marble, dirt, etc.

As Tileable Textures are used for large areas of polygons it balances out in performance. As tileable textures usually have high quality textures using color, metallic, roughness, and normals the result looks great.

Can be very easily seen as repeating so you may need to find solutions to counter that such as improving the texture, using other assets on or around it to break it up, or use shaders/approaches like terrain to break up the texture with other tileable textures.

It's not a good idea to use tileable textures for everything as you would need to use too many materials, which would cost in performance. The key here is one material for a lot of polygons in the environment such as the actual environment (paths, rocks etc), or a large building.

Hand Painted textures

• Intermediate level due to artistic ability

• Fast to medium speed

• Less optimised due to number of textures and materials.

Hand painted textures do tend to use a lot of materials but creates very unique assets with a lot of style when done well. In most cases a game or experience would use custom hand painted assets for key elements such as characters and hand painted trim sheets for environments and common props.

Hand Painted textures look amazing when done well and has the most style than any other approach.

Depending on how the complete experience is created, can be a little expensive on processing and larger on filesize due to all the custom textures.

Trim Sheets

• Intermediate level

• Medium speed

• Highly optimised

Trim sheets are a type of texture that includes multiple types of materials in one so that a single asset uses a single material for improved performance, but can have different types of material. With smart use of the material you can create amazing results with very little resources.

In many cases you may create the asset from both 3D and 2D perspectives. You may add polygons in order to better utilise the texture, and vice versa.

Looks great and good performance. Can be used in really creative ways.

Can take a little longer to create in order to get the best use out of a single material. Not great to use for assets that require unique or custom features.

High Polygon Assets

• Advanced Level

• Slow to create

• Least optimised (in comparison to other methods)

• Highest quality result

High polygon assets are most commonly found in AAA games and look great. The most common style is realistic, but stylized can also apply. The high polygon assets cannot be used in game due to the polycount unless it's a high end gaming device using Unreal (with Nanite technology). That said, animating high polygon assets or using high polygon assets in applications such as Blender can be slow.

You can make high polygon assets in a number of ways, the most common are hard surface modelling for inorganic assets like cars or buildings, Digital Sculpting for organic assets like characters or monsters, or using AI to generate assets that usually have no consideration for polycount.

It is highly recommended to make a low or medium polygon asset to project, or bake, your high polygon asset detail onto using Normal textures etc.

The results look great and can generally cover any style you would like to make.

Can be expensive in polycount, material count, and texture size. These approaches are usually used for desktop gaming for the highest quality assets. That said it is possible to optimise even further to take the assets to other platforms including mobile or standalone VR/XR.